


Jurassic World: The Most Dangerous Game

by GodfreyRaphael



Series: Godfrey Raphael's Jurassic World [1]
Category: Jurassic Park - All Media Types, Jurassic World Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: At first it looks like just another plane crashes in Sorna fic, But it's actually a bit deeper than that, F/M, Isla Sorna is still Site B, Takes place after the Second Isla Nublar Incident, There are also drug cartels involved, Weaponized dinosaurs, post jurassic world
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-22
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-07-12 05:45:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 20
Words: 64,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15988874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodfreyRaphael/pseuds/GodfreyRaphael
Summary: A plane crashes on Isla Sorna, the infamous Site B, on the same day as the Second Isla Nublar Incident. Just hours after surviving the escape of theIndominus rex, Owen and Claire are taken by a secretive private military contractor to help guide them through Site B in search of survivors of the plane crash. But that's not the whole story. Turns out Henry Wu has been working on some projects of his own that even he won't dare put in Isla Nublar, projects that include Vic Hoskins' dream of weaponized dinosaurs. When a dinosaur attack inevitably splits apart the search party, Owen and Claire will encounter more than their fair share of animals and even some unexpected guests in their quest to just get out of Site B alive.





	1. Prologue: Welcome to Site B

**Author's Note:**

> I'm importing some of my works on FanFiction.net and posting them all over here as well, and that includes my first Jurassic Park/World fanfic The Most Dangerous Game. The first few chapters of this were written way back in 2015, when Jurassic World was released, but then I took a long hiatus from this work and only began updating it again as Fallen Kingdom got closer and closer. Now The Most Dangerous Game is here as well, and I hope you enjoy it too. - GR

Irene Pardew opened her eyes for the first time in a long time.

The last thing that she remembered was that the plane had suddenly come under attack from… something. Her brother had been at the controls of the plane, and he had told her to brace just before the plane was rocked by whatever had attacked them, and then she lost consciousness.

The last few days had not been kind to Irene. She and her brother Matthew were the children of Richard Seamus Pardew, owner and head of Pardew Consumer Services and Protection Applications, one of the largest private security companies in the world. But that wasn’t Irene and Matthew’s only claim to fame. They were also the hosts of their own travel-show-with-a-twist, _Travelsick_. The concept of their show was simple: they went to the places that weren’t usually high on ordinary people’s lists of prime vacation spots. Their criteria was simple: what are the places that are actually quite nice to visit but would not be prime vacation spots because of circumstances such as notability and notoriety. In their show’s first season, they’d gone to such places as South Africa, the Philippines, Uruguay, even the American Midwest, but what made their show really stick out was that sometimes they’d join in on activities that normally wouldn’t even be considered as part of a regular tourist tour. They had climbed up the mountains of Kashmir and stayed with an Indian Army forward operating base. They had seen the sides of North Korea that the reclusive dictatorship was reluctant to show the West.

_Travelsick_ ’s first season had been quite a hit with the public, or at least that’s what the ratings told the network. Obviously, a second season had to be made. But how else could they possibly top the adventures of season one? The siblings had spent some time thinking about that until Matthew finally hit upon the answer.

The opening of Jurassic World had been one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of mankind. It was, quite literally, twenty years in the making. Jurassic World, owned and operated by the massive multinational entity known as the Masrani Conglomerate, had been built on the foundations of Jurassic Park, the grandest dream of John Hammond, founder of International Genetics, or InGen for short. Hammond had lived through the suffering of World War Two and had come out of that with a determination to give the world happiness and keep giving it to the people. But he didn’t have any idea how to do that until the 1980s, when genetics and genetic engineering was all the rage in the scientific community, and scientists were bandying about ideas and possibilities of the new technology. High up on the list of possibilities was cloning an extinct animal and bringing it back to life. Back then, scientists had managed to extract a large amount of DNA from a sample of quagga hide. The quagga had been an African grazing herbivore, similar to the gazelle and the antelope, that had become extinct in the 19th century. With the quagga’s entire genome now available to scientists, people in these academic circles began thinking of the possibility of bringing the quagga, and other species like the passenger pigeon an the Iberian ibex, back to life.

But Hammond thought that the technology could be used to bring back animals that had been extinct for a far longer time, like dinosaurs. Everybody liked dinosaurs. Back then, that had been a universal truth. Museums were always earning millions on their dinosaur fossil exhibits, and that was with the animals already dead. How much would they pay to see a dinosaur alive? This was just one of the motivating factors why Hammond decided to establish InGen and establish a theme park which star attractions are all living and breathing dinosaurs. To that end, Hammond leased and eventually bought an island off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica by the name of Isla Nublar, and he began construction of his “biological preserve” there. By 1993, the park, now called Jurassic Park, was almost ready to open to the public. However, during a preliminary exhibition in front of noted palaeontologists, paloebotanists and mathematicians, the park’s security systems failed. People died, and Hammond and InGen were forced to abandon Jurassic Park.

That would have been the end of the story for InGen and Jurassic Park, were it not for an InGen ship crashing into San Diego’s harbour and unleashing a _Tyrannosaurus rex_ onto the unsuspecting city. Both the rex and the ship were eventually discovered to have come from Isla Sorna, another Costa Rican island that InGen had bought from the Central American country’s government. Thus the general public became aware of InGen’s technological breakthrough, and the fact that dinosaurs had been resurrected on a bunch of islands in the Pacific. But following the return of the rex to Sorna, the United Nations signed a declaration stating that Sorna was now both a natural preserve and a restricted area on land, air and sea.

Perhaps people would have just had to content themselves knowing that dinosaurs were alive on Sorna (InGen didn’t reveal that dinosaurs were also present on Isla Nublar, which they somehow managed to retain possession of even though it was a large drain in their balance) but maybe it was because some kind of higher power was thinking that humanity would not have been ready yet for the concept of living dinosaurs in the present. In the end, Hammond wasn’t able to realize his dream of bringing joy and happiness to the people of the world through his park and his dinosaurs, having died in 1997, just a few weeks after the “San Diego incident.” But another man stood ready to make Hammond’s dream a reality, and that man was Simon Masrani.

Masrani was the owner of one of the largest telecommunications companies in India, and International Genetics had been his first major corporate purchase, fulfilling the wish of his old family friend John Hammond. He saw the potential of Jurassic Park, and at great cost to his company Masrani invested resources into rebuilding Hammond’s dream. Humans returned to Nublar for the first time in five years, recapturing the dinosaurs that had gone loose following the first park’s failure and rebuilding at the southern part of the island, far from the disaster of the original park. Finally, in 2005, the park, now rebranded as Jurassic World, opened to the public for the first time. It was an unprecedented success. Humans could now look at dinosaurs, animals of an age far into the past, in the flesh. It was every child and child-at-heart’s dream come true.

What everyone didn’t know was that Masrani and InGen had secretly gone back to Isla Sorna and continued producing the majority of their “assets” there, quite possibly in violation of international law. Meanwhile, once people had gotten over the fact that dinosaurs now exist once among us, some of them eventually became curious. What did a dinosaur taste like? What kind of food would be a stegosaurus steak, or a triceratops T-bone? A few “enterprising individuals” eventually got wind of those gastronomically curious about dinosaurs, and they began these selling such products. However, as dinosaurs, or at least the dinosaur species that had been brought back to life by InGen, had been declared endangered species, hunting and killing the dinosaurs on Sorna for food and sport was illegal, and once the authorities had heard about this troubling new side of poaching, they cracked down hard on the industry. That didn’t prevent people, especially the Chinese, from continuing to demand dinosaur meat for food, and soon unscrupulous Costa Ricans were now offering “hunting safaris” on Sorna so their customers could get their dinosaur meat “fresh from the source,” as they said. It was quite a lucrative business. In the first half of 2015 alone, at least ten “hunts” had been caught by UN and Costa Rican authorities. There was no doubt that much more hunts had managed to slip past the authorities.

Matthew Pardew had thought it a good idea if season two of _Travelsick_ began with a dinosaur hunt on Isla Sorna. His sister Irene had reluctantly agreed to the idea, but the network officials were quite enthusiastic and approving of Matt’s plan. So the two began sending feelers into the dinosaur meat trade, trying to establish themselves as two rich kids in search of both an adrenaline rush and a desire to hunt “the most famous animals to walk the earth,” according to Matt’s words. Eventually they finally made contact with a Costa Rican who said that he could bring them to “the best hunting ground on Sorna.” The arrangements were made, cash changed hands, and soon they got the call to go to San Jose, capital of Costa Rica.

Matt, the more capable pilot of the two siblings, had flown their private plane to San Jose by himself, as agreed with the Costa Ricans. To maintain the pretense of a rich kids’ idea of adventure, they had brought along two more people with them. One was a family friend who had been loyally serving Pardew since his honourable discharge from the United States Army, while the other was a Filipino tracker that the Pardews had befriended during their time in Manila and brought into the company so that he could provide for his family.

They had landed in San Jose without incident, and when their contact boarded the plane alone they thought that he alone would be guiding them to their “hunting ground” in Sorna. However, their contact then told them to fly to Managua, capital of neighboring Nicaragua, where they were to pick up the rest of the hunters. The rest of the hunters turned out to have been about twelve or so in number, and because of the nature of their work, they were quite concerned about being filmed, and they asked that the camera crew got off the plane for the rest of the journey to Sorna. Fortunately the Pardews had a Plan B: secret cameras in their clothes and bags.

The flight from Nicaragua to Sorna was uneventful, at least until they were finally flying over the landmass. Matt, who was flying the plane with the hunters’ own pilot, was searching for a place to land, while the hunters’ pilot had been wanting to show Matt the hunting grounds first. Irene had heard the two arguing in the cockpit, and she had gone over there to check on her brother. While Matt had been telling her the differences between him and the other pilot, something had hit the plane, and then whatever had hit them then began attacking them. It was the only way to describe what had happened: something took hold of the plane and began pecking at it with what sounded like a very tough beak. Whatever it had been wasn’t able to penetrate the aircraft aluminium, thank goodness, but it had messed up the plane’s controls badly, and Matt had been able to shout a warning to Irene to brace, and Irene had even been able to run for the last row of seats and buckle up before the plane made shuddering contact with the ground, and then Irene had blacked out after that.

Now Irene had regained consciousness, and she saw that she was still buckled into the last seat in the airplane, but the rest of the fuselage had vanished. In front of Irene was the great expanse of the crash site, with pieces of metal and glass scattered all over the place. Aside from the section of the plane that she was in, the largest piece of wreckage was just as large as a car door.

Irene felt black and blue, and merely moving was an exercise in tolerating pain. Eventually she managed to unbuckle her seat belt, and Irene got off the seat and out of the wreck. There was little left resembling an airplane except from the bit of wreckage that she had just come from. It was as if the rest of the plane had simply disintegrated. Irene tried looking for other survivors of the crash, including her brother Matt, but she could no bodies, no survivors, nothing.

Being the lone survivor of a plane crash wasn’t the least of Irene Pardew’s worries, though. Irene was the lone survivor of a plane crash on a dinosaur island.

And there was more bad news in store for her. Irene had heard rumors and talk between the hunters that they had picked up in Nicaragua that the place where they were supposed to do their “hunting trip” was what the locals called “carnivore country.” She could only assume that they called it that because it was where most of the carnivorous dinosaurs produced by InGen roamed. If she couldn’t find any sort of shelter soon, Irene could end up becoming dinosaur food. A bit of her realized the irony, but Irene herself was busy trying to survive to appreciate the irony of the situation: she had gone to Sorna to hunt dinosaurs, and now she was about to become the one hunted.

Right on cue, Irene felt the earth shaking slightly. A second later, it was followed by a slightly stronger shaking, which was now accompanied by a soft booming noise. The shaking ground and booming noise got stronger and louder by the second, and Irene spun around, looking for a potential hiding spot amongst the debris of the crash site, but she couldn’t find anything except the bit of fuselage where she had just come from. Out of options, Irene ducked back into the intact tail section, going for the cargo hold below instead of climbing up to the passenger cabin. She slid herself into the deepest and darkest corner of the cargo hold, and then she stopped once she could go no further. Irene waited as the shaking of the ground got even stronger, and then suddenly, she could finally see what was making all the shaking and booming.

It was a motherfucking _T. rex_ , one of the largest land predators to ever walk the earth. It wasn’t the largest of carnivorous dinosaurs, but it was certainly one of the most well-known and most popular species. InGen had made a calculated risk when they decided to clone the species for Jurassic Park and later on Jurassic World, and it had exceeded all expectations.

Now one such animal was just a few hundred yards from Irene. She was praying and hoping against hope that the tyrannosaur would at most not be curious about the crash site and just ignore this sudden new arrival in its territory.

The rex sniffed the air tentatively. Its small arms waved in the air. And then it began walking towards the tail of the fuselage, the part where Irene had taken refuge. Every step of the rex shook the very earth itself, and Irene had to bite her lip to keep from screaming in sheer terror. She heard the rex sniffing the broken remains of the jet, nudging it and generally trying to determine if it was a rival out to claim its territory. Then the rex roared, a deep primeval bellow that had never before been heard by human ears. Irene trembled in fear as she pressed her hands to her ears and bit her tongue to keep her own scream from escaping her lips.

The rex began to examine Irene’s hiding place more closely. It bent its head down and sniffed at the interior of the plane. _Thank God its head is so big_ , she thought as the dinosaur’s jaw almost touched the muddy ground. _Good thing I went down here instead of up there. It would have seen me already._ The rex was breathing a bit faster now, like a hound that had caught the scent of the hunted wolf. And at that moment Irene realized with horror that the rex could smell her. The rex was no longer looking for its prey; it had found it, and now it was just waiting for her to make a mistake and reveal herself.

The rex bellowed right into the cargo hold. Irene clapped her hands over her ears once again and bit her tongue so hard it began to bleed. She fought the urge to spit the mix of blood and saliva in her mouth and instead swallowed the coppery-like mixture. The rex then began nudging the wreckage once again, but this time with more purpose. Irene knew that she had only a little time left before the rex finally got her and ate her.

Then Irene thought she heard a groaning sound. At first, she thought that it was just her imagination or her ears tricking her into thinking that the tyrannosaur’s breathing sounded like groaning. Then she heard it again, and this time she was sure it was a man groaning, and the rex stopped nudging the fuselage. Irene heard the groaning once more, and the tyrannosaur turned away from the fuselage to look for the source of the noise. From her point of view Irene saw that it was one of the hunters that they had picked up in Nicaragua that was making the groaning. How he had managed to escape her noticed earlier she did not know, but now she wished that the man had just died in the crash itself.

The rex walked over to the hunter’s body and began sniffing it. Then, it began nudging the man with its head. _Don’t move_ , Irene thought. _Don’t move, you son of a bitch_. But she couldn’t voice her thoughts out loud, and therefore she was powerless to prevent what happened next, and she could only watch the coming carnage.

The hunter finally stirred awake. The tyrannosaur stopped nudging the animal that had suddenly appeared in its territory and began staring at it. The hunter opened his eyes, saw the dinosaur that stood over him, and screamed. At that same moment, the rex brought down its head and clamped the hunter in its jaws. The man screamed even more as he was lifted up into the air in the tyrannosaur’s jaws. Then the rex bit down. One shake of its head was all it needed. The hunter’s screaming turned into a strangled gurgle, and then the rex lowered his body to ground and began to devour it. Irene had to turn away. The sounds of flesh being torn and bones breaking were already giving her vivid mental images. She didn’t have to see the real thing herself, lest she throw up and give the rex one more clue on where she was hiding.

It was over in just a few minutes. The rex’s jaws were coated with blood, having just finished its most recent meal. The dinosaur lifted its head, roared softly as it felt its hunger being satiated, and then it walked back to where Irene had been hiding and resumed its search for her. Irene cursed herself silently for not having made a break for it while the rex was busy eating the poor hunter. But then she realized that the rex could still see her if she had tried to escape, and there was no doubt in her mind that she would have ended up as dino chow just like the hunter if she had done that.

But something felt wrong about the whole thing to Irene. That kind of persistence from a predator, especially an apex predator that had literally fed just minutes ago, was unnatural. But then again, InGen had never claimed that they created real, authentic dinosaurs. Predators like the _Tyrannosaurus rex_ should have moved on once it was finished eating its most recent kill. Then again, a human was a puny thing compared to the _T. rex_. Perhaps one guy just wasn’t enough to fill its belly up.

Now all Irene could hope for was that the rex finally grew tired of waiting for her to reveal herself and left her alone. But as she thought that, she also thought that maybe the rex was going hungry right now, having just eaten one puny human. The longer she waited, the more the rex might want to eat her.

Then Irene heard the unmistakable hiss of a flare being ignited. She saw a faint red glow to the tyrannosaur’s right side, which the dinosaur also noticed. It turned away from Irene’s hiding place and bellowed at this new bright thing that had suddenly entered its territory.

Once the rex had moved its body away from the fuselage, Irene could see that it was her brother Matt—thank God he survived!—who was holding the flare. The rex roared at him once again and began advancing towards him. Irene wanted so bad to shout at her younger brother to throw the flare away, but she managed to catch herself just in time. Instead she could only mutter the words as tears flowed from her eyes, helpless to watch her brother stand up to one of the biggest predators of all time.

The rex roared at Matt once again and continued walking towards him. To his credit Matt stood his ground for as long as possible and then he threw the flare away from him, towards a small grove of trees. The rex’s head followed the flare as it landed amongst the trees, and it began to head towards the grove, completely ignoring the potential prey item that had just been holding the flare moments ago.

Matt waited until he was out of the rex’s line of sight before heading for the wreckage. Irene slid out of her hiding place as he drew near, and then the two of them embraced each other. “Oh, thank God you’re alive, Matt,” Irene said. “I thought I was the only one that made it.”

“Me too, Irene, me too,” Matt replied. “Thank God you made it too. Are you okay? Any cuts, injuries, that kind of thing?”

“I’m fine, Matty, just fine,” Irene said. Matty had been her pet name for her younger brother. Matt didn’t like it, but as the elder sibling Irene could use it whenever she wanted. “Dear God, Matt, that was either the best thing or the craziest thing that I have ever seen you do. Even crazier than when you took up a gun and helped the Indians fight off those Pakistanis in Kashmir.”

“I know, right?” Matt replied. “Nick and Justin also made it through, thank God, and they helped me set up the thing for the rex.” Nick and Justin were the other Pardew personnel that they had brought with them for the “dinosaur hunting episode.”

“Set up the thing? What are you talking about? What did you put in that grove for the T. rex?”

“The other pilot didn’t make it. Nick and I dragged him over to the grove, where we’d thought he’d make a nice distraction.”

“Yeah, okay, but what’s with the guns on your back?”

“We’re stuck on an island full of dinosaurs, Irene. How else are we gonna survive and make it back to the rest of the world?”

“Okay,” Irene said, nodding her head. “Where are Nick and Justin, though? I haven’t seen them.”

“They’re in the forest over there,” Matt replied, pointing in the general direction where he had last saw the two other survivors.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Irene muttered. She then took the opportunity to punch Matt in the arm. “What was that for!?” he demanded.

“You could have killed yourself with that crazy stunt of yours!” Irene replied. “What if the rex had followed you instead of the flare?”

“Well, then it would have been game over for me.”

“Everything’s a game for you.”

“But it didn’t chase me, Irene. That’s what matters.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” And then she punched Matt once again. “It’s still a stupid plan, stupid,” she said.

“I guess I deserved that one,” Matt replied. “Okay, do you still need to get anything from the plane? Our pal Rexy’s just about finished with the other pilot by now, and I wouldn’t want to be around when she’s looking for more food.”

“Okay, let me just get my bag.” Irene then climbed up to the passenger cabin, but as she did that, Matt said, “Irene, are you okay? There’s blood on your leg. And your bottom as well.”

“What?” Irene looked down and saw that a few drops of dark red blood had gone down her left leg and into her sock. She then reached behind her and touched the seat of her shorts. Her fingers came away smeared in blood.

“Oh, crap,” she muttered. Aunt Flo had decided to come on the absolute worst moment of Irene Pardew’s life.

Matt saw Irene disappear into the inner reaches of the fuselage. When she popped back out she had tied her shirt around her waist, and she had her pack with her. “Come on then, Matt, let’s go,” she said. “You’re the one who said you didn’t want to be here when Rexy comes back, right?”

Matt and Irene then began running away from the crash site and for the forest, and they melted into the treeline just as the tyrannosaur roared at the heavens once again.


	2. Chilean Sea Bass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hours after barely surviving the Second Isla Nublar Incident, Owen and Claire are approached by a mysterious man who apparently needs help in navigating Site B, Isla Sorna.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys, just a little heads up: the first four or five chapters of this fic were written back in 2015, almost just a few days after the release of the original _Jurassic World_. Some of the stuff I've written here such as the fact that there are a couple of other new Jurassic Worlds on other islands should no longer be treated as canon, at least within my series. Just a heads up.

The establishment of Jurassic World had been a literal godsend both for Costa Rica in general and the seaside town of Puntarenas in particular. Before the opening of Jurassic World, Puntarenas had been just like any other small seaside town in the world: the people made their living mostly through fishing, the government officials came by once a year if at all, and life was basically quiet and easy. That had all changed when the Masrani Corporation arrived at the town and began construction of a large port easily capable of handling five cruise ships at the same time. At first the townspeople thought the people building the port mad. _Who would ever come to tiny Puntarenas in cruise ships?_ , they asked themselves. Their curiosity was brought even higher when Masrani also began improving the town’s tiny dirt airstrip into a small yet efficient airport that could give municipal airports in the United States a run for their money. The Western companies must be planning or doing something big if it required giving Puntarenas both a port and an airport, the townspeople thought.

Then the Masrani Corporation unveiled Jurassic World, an island resort, park and biological preserve on one of Costa Rica’s Pacific islands, Isla Nublar. Within just days, Puntarenas had become the second-most visited city in Costa Rica, just after the capital San Jose itself. Thousands of people made the flight from San Jose to Puntarenas and then board the ships and ferries that would take them to Jurassic World. At first, the tourists saw Puntarenas as just a stopping point between the mainland and Jurassic World itself, but then someone thought of establishing a tour of the town. It was a great success, and as time went on people were telling other people that their Jurassic World experience would not be complete without having gone on a tour of Puntarenas at least once.

That was the way of life for Puntarenas for the next ten years.

Today, things were a bit different. People were still in Puntarenas, but they weren’t going anywhere. There were no ships going to Isla Nublar or Jurassic World, but some ships were still coming in from the island. There were no flights to or from the town’s airport—yet. While travel in and out of Puntarenas had not exactly been restricted, the circumstances leading up to this unfortunate series of events had been so new to the authorities that they didn’t have any idea how to deal with it except keep all of the witnesses in one place.

Jurassic World had been in the process of preparing a new dinosaur for the park. Whereas their first dinosaurs were species that were well-known to the public, this new attraction, as they called it, was a genetically-made hybrid. Only the name of the new dinosaur had been revealed by the park in its press packets: _Indominus rex_. An as-yet-unknown series of events had led to the _Indominus_ breaking out of its holding paddock and going on a rampage throughout the park, resulting in the evacuation of the over twenty thousand people on the island at the time. While initial eyewitness statements were quite confusing and sometimes contradictory, one of the common things in their accounts was that apparently the _Indominus_ had gotten into a fight with the park’s main attraction, a _Tyrannosaurus rex_. The fight lasted for some time before the _Indominus_ was apparently attacked by the mosasaur and brought down to the prehistoric sea monster’s reservoir.

The world was waiting expectantly for a statement from either the park’s management or maybe even the owner of the park himself, Simon Masrani, but both entities were currently unavailable for comment. There were some rumors though that Masrani himself had been either involved or caught up in one of the operations to contain the hybrid dinosaur and had died as a result. Masrani’s estate was neither confirming nor denying the rumors, but to some the mere fact that they were not confirming or denying the rumors was proof itself that Simon Masrani, the eighth richest man in the world, was now dead.

Unknown to the press, there were two people who could have told them the entirety of the events that had occurred in Jurassic World on that fateful day that were currently in Puntarenas. But even if they found out about them, they wouldn’t be able to find them in the airport hangars where the survivors of the “Jurassic World incident” were currently being housed, as they had gone away for the purpose of avoiding the press in particular and the public in general.

Puntarenas’ basic layout was similar to other towns in countries that had once been occupied by the Spanish empire. There was a church and a plaza in the middle of town facing the house of the governor’s representative in the town. There were a number of houses and businesses that had sprung up around the plaza in the present day, and one of those businesses was a cantina. It was a slow day for that particular cantina. Most of the waiters and waitresses were seated in the tables usually reserved for customers, talking about how uneventful the usually-busy lunch hour had become. There was a television turned on in the background, tuned to a news channel that was talking about the Jurassic World incident in Spanish. The newscasters were talking about the events surrounding the Jurassic World incident, and what it could mean for the future of Costa Rica. But there was a radio playing that was louder than the television, and it was currently playing Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady.” Definitely not the kind of cantina music one would expect.

There were only two people in the cantina who were clearly customers, a man and a woman. The woman, who seemed to have more authority between the two, had bright orange hair, a sight that the locals had seen only rarely. Meanwhile, the man looked more like the average foreigner, with short black hair and a rough beard. The two of them had been talking in English for some time, but that had been a few minutes ago, and now they had gone silent, and kept looking at the kitchen, the television, the outside of the cantina, anywhere but at each other. The cantina waiters sensed that there was some kind of awkwardness going on between the two. It was the only explanation they could come up with.

A waiter finally came out of the cantina’s kitchen, carrying a single plate. He walked over to where the man and woman were seated—they didn’t appear to be a couple—and laid the plate on the table. “Order complete,” he said in heavily-accented English.

Claire Dearing, the orange-haired woman, looked at the plate before her and then at the waiter. She was the head of operations of Jurassic World and therefore was quite knowledgeable about the truth behind the Jurassic World incident, but that was also the reason why she was in this cantina and not in the hangars with the other survivors. And while she admitted that she was not a fluent Spanish speaker, she did know that _uno_ meant one and _dos_ meant two. And she clearly remembered ordering for two. “This is just for one person,” she told the waiter. “ _Uno plato_.”

“All fish have,” the waiter replied, and then he turned around and went back to his place in the counter and in front of the television.

“I think what he meant to say was that that was all the fish that they had,” said Owen Grady, the man who was seated across the table from Claire. Technically, he was part of InGen and not Jurassic World, but he was also intimately connected with the events of the Jurassic World incident. But before he was an employee of InGen, he had been in the United States Navy and had even spent time as a SEAL, the Navy’s special forces branch. Publicly, his role within Jurassic World was a trade secret, but some of the higher-ranking Jurassic World personnel knew that Grady’s job was to train velociraptors, or at least do something quite close to training them. Owen himself had said that he was not training the raptors, but rather he had a sort of bond with them that allowed him to get much closer to these dinosaurs than other people. The secretive nature of his work had also made him reluctant to discuss the Jurassic World incident, and that was before non-disclosure agreements had even been brought up.

Claire and Owen were quite the odd couple. They weren’t lovers, but they certainly were more than just friends, kind of stuck between two levels. Perhaps they didn’t want to put a label on their relationship just yet. Perhaps they weren’t yet ready to make the leap of faith. Whatever the case, there was something between them, and people could see it and feel it.

Claire sighed and looked at the food on the plate. “I don’t think that’s Chilean sea bass,” she said.

“Well, what did you expect?” Owen said in reply. “Costa Rica is a thousand, two thousand miles away from Chile. That fish on your plate’s probably just some fish the locals caught off the coast.”

“Then why do they have a sign that says ‘House Specialty: Chilean Sea Bass’?”

“I don’t know, Claire. Maybe it _is_ their house specialty, and we just arrived on an off day. Come on. Give it a try.”

Claire reached out and speared a piece of fish with a fork. She brought the fish to her mouth and began to chew. “Bleurgh,” she said, making a face. “It’s like cardboard.”

“Really?” Owen took his fork, got a piece of fish with it, and tasted it himself. “Hmm,” he muttered. “It tastes like that Biosyn trout that they got in Idaho,” he told Claire.

“Biosyn trout?”

“Yeah, back in 1989 or something like that, Biosyn released some genetically-modified trout in Idaho’s rivers with the approval of their Department of Game and Sport. The trout was pale; you could see it in the river, but that meant they sunburned easily. Also, people said these trout were tasteless, as in literally it didn’t taste like anything.”

“Huh,” Claire muttered. “All I remember about Biosyn is that they tried to buy InGen when they went Chapter 11.” She stuck another piece of fish into her mouth before continuing. “Now I’m glad that they gave us only one fish. I don’t think the two of us would’ve been able to eat all that fish.”

“True that.”

Once again, the two of them went silent, nibbling on the “Chilean sea bass” whenever they felt like it. Finally, Owen spoke up, and he asked, “Something troubling you?”

“I’m just thinking about what comes next,” Claire replied. “You know, J-World’s closed; the dinosaurs have escaped. I don’t know if we’ll ever go back there again.” J-World was the employees’ nickname for Jurassic World.

“Don’t beat yourself too much about it,” Owen said. “Yeah, J-World’s closed, but that doesn’t mean it’s gonna be closed forever. Jurassic World is like Masrani’s crown jewel; they won’t just let it rot like the old park. How many people were there just yesterday? Twenty thousand, something like that?” Claire nodded her head in assent. “And that’s already with the ‘people look at a _Stegosaurus_ like it’s an elephant’ stuff that made you go ahead with the _Indominus_. Like I said, dinosaurs are wow enough. People will still come back looking at them even if they’ve seen them before already. Also, zoos suffer breakouts all the time. Do they get closed just because a tiger or a lion got out of its cage? No; they just recapture whatever escaped and then reopen. The only really dangerous animals loose on Nublar right now are Blue and Rexy. The pterosaurs and the _Dimorphodons_ were all brought back to the containment aviary after we finally took care of them. Once you get the rex and Blue rounded up and back in their paddocks, it’s just a matter of rebuilding Main Street, and then J-World’s probably in business. And, even if Masrani decides not to reopen Nublar, there’s still Europe and Japan.”

Following the massive success of Jurassic World, Masrani had announced that they were going to build at least two more parks nearer to the European and Asian markets. Jurassic World Japan had been opened first, built on an uninhabited island between the Marianas and Iwo Jima, to cater to the rapidly growing East Asian market, particularly the Chinese. Meanwhile, Jurassic World Europe had been opened just about a year ago on an island that had previously been subject to a dispute between Portugal and Cape Verde, with the former claiming that it was part of the Azores, and the latter stating that the island was part of its archipelago. Masrani had solved that dispute singlehandedly by buying the island and building Jurassic World Europe on it.

“Yeah, I suppose if Nublar doesn’t reopen, there is still Sao Conrado and Nashi-shima,” Claire said, referring to the parks by the names of the islands they had been built on.

Owen sighed. “You know, Claire, this scene is so perfect,” he said. “You know, just you and me talking over some food about life and plans, calling each other ‘Owen’ and ‘Claire’ instead of ‘Mr. Grady’ and ‘Ms. Dearing.’ We make a good couple, don’t we? Why didn’t it work out between us?”

Claire cracked a smile at that. “Probably because we only tried to become a couple after we got drunk that one time and had sex,” she said.

“What’s wrong with that?” Owen replied. “I mean, isn’t that what happens in chick flicks and rom-coms?” Indeed, it was only just about a year ago that Claire, then still just one of the candidates to being J-World’s head of operations, and Owen, still reeling from the fact that he was being asked to train actual and living velociraptors, had first met in a bar just a short walk from the cantina where they were presently eating. They had gotten drunk, one thing led to another, and they had woken up to find themselves in each other’s arms. They had tried hard to forget about that night, but they just couldn’t, so they decided to try for a real relationship. Unfortunately their first date had ended in disaster, with the two committing various faux pas that ended up with them deciding not to further pursue the matter. However, the events of the last day seemed to have conspired to bring them together.

“Maybe that’s because those are movies, and this is real life,” Claire retorted with a smile. “But then again, you’ve been spending a lot of time with your raptors that you probably don’t know the difference between the two, Lafayette.”

Owen almost did a double take. “Whoa, now, what’s with using my middle name now, Nikita?” he asked. “And what’s my middle name got to do with me not knowing the difference between movies and real life?”

“Nothing, really,” Claire said. “I just find it funny that you think Lafayette is an embarrassing middle name. At least the famous person who had the same name was also a guy. When I was born, the only famous person named Nikita was Khrushchev, and La Femme Nikita wasn’t around yet.”

“I thought you liked it when I called you Nikita back when we had sex.”

“Well, you liked it when I called you Lafayette.”

“What’s not to like about the guy? He’s French, he wasn’t a surrender monkey, and he even fought for America in the Revolution! Anyway, how did we end up talking about our middle names?”

“I don’t know, but I will admit I did start it,” Claire said.

Owen looked at the plate of “Chilean” sea bass. It was still half-full, with about ten fillet slices left on the plate. At the rate they were going, there was probably going to be some leftovers for dinner. “Let me ask you a serious question, Claire,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“If Masrani hadn’t decided to go for the hybrid dinosaur, what would you have made in its place?”

“Why would you ask me that?”

“Just genuinely curious.”

Claire put down her fork and leaned forward. “If the _Indominus_ hadn’t been approved, I think we would have probably gone for a _Titanoboa_ or a _Megalania_ ,” she said. “I know, they’re not dinosaurs, but the thinking back then was that maybe the dinosaurs weren’t enough to pull people in anymore. Maybe we needed something new. You do know about the planned Pleistocene Park in the Aleutians, right?”

“You know what, Claire? I think I would have preferred the Titanoboa or the Megalania to the Indominus,” Owen said.

At that moment Owen and Claire noticed that two men were now walking towards them. The man bringing up the rear was beefy and bald and basically had the generic look of a bodyguard. The man walking up to them, meanwhile, got their attention. His face was bright red—probably more the result of a poorly-applied fake tan than any underlying medical condition. He had crazy curly brown hair that made him look like the guy from _Ancient Aliens_ , and he also had on a tacky brown suit like the kind that the _Ancient Aliens_ guy liked to wear. He even had a lapel pin version of the Mayan bird statue that the _Ancient Aliens_ show claimed was proof that extraterrestrials had taught the Mayans the secret of flight.

“Are you Claire Dearing and Owen Grady?” he asked them.

“Well, you found us,” Owen replied. “Who are you?”

“Giannis Katsouranis,” the man replied, extending his hand, which held a pair of calling cards. “I’m with Pardew Consumer Services and Protection Applications.”

“Hang on a minute,” Owen said. “Did you say you were from Pardew?”

“Yes, I did,” Katsouranis replied. “I’m the head of the Practical Protection Applications division; basically Pardew’s private security arm. There is a certain matter that we have to discuss in private.”

“Why us, Mr. Katsouranis?” Claire asked. “What makes us more important to whatever you want to discuss instead of any other person in Costa Rica?”

“Let’s just say that you, Ms. Dearing, know the place quite well, and Mr. Grady here knows the animals that live there.”

It took them a moment to realize what Katsouranis was talking about. “Does this have anything to do with what happened at Isla Nublar?” Owen asked.

“It’s not Nublar, actually,” Katsouranis replied. “It is one of InGen’s islands, but it’s not the one with the park.”

“Isla Sorna?” Claire asked.

“Indeed,” Katsouranis said with a nod of his head. “And that’s all I can discuss with you in public. If you’d like, we can continue this conversation in my car.”

“Wait a minute, Mr. Katsouranis,” Claire said, standing up from her seat. “Jurassic World may be closed right now, but we’re still employees of Masrani and InGen. And the last time I looked, Pardew wasn’t one of Masrani’s companies, and also not the other way around.”

“Yes, Ms. Dearing, you’re right about that, but something has happened that involves all of our respective employers, and I think we’ll all have to work together and with each other for this. Please, let’s continue this in my car.”

“He’s tenacious, isn’t he?” Owen asked Claire as the two men from Pardew began walking back to their SUV.

“I’ve met corporate types like him before,” Claire replied. “You give them an objective, and they’ll achieve it by hook or by crook, come hell or high water. Also, I haven’t heard of any company named Pardew before.”

“I have,” Owen said. “They’re private security. I’ve seen them before, back when I was still in the Navy. They’re in the usual places: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. And that’s got me worried. Hoskins wanted to use the raptors as weapons for the military. What if Pardew’s trying to do the same, even beat InGen in its own game?”

“Well, we won’t know just standing here and talking about it,” Claire said. “We _have_ to come with him.”

“Did we even have a choice?”

“I think we were in it as soon as he talked to us,” Claire replied. “I just hope we can get out as easily.”

“Unless it’s one of those ‘once you’re in, you can never be out’ type of things,” Owen quipped as he laid a ten-dollar bill on the table beside the plate of “Chilean” sea bass, and then he and Claire walked over to Katsouranis’ SUV and got in.


	3. The Fastest Ship in Existence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Owen and Claire are told the reasons why they should help Pardew Protection Services navigate Isla Sorna.

As Claire and Owen got into the SUV, Katsouranis picked up an iPad and began thumbing through the data that was on it. “You’re Claire Nikita Dearing, I assume,” he said to Claire. Born on March 2, 1981 in Los Angeles to Gary and Daniella Dearing; graduated from Stanford with a degree in business administration and management then hired by Masrani Global in ’07 and working through the ranks before finally becoming head of operations of Jurassic World in December 2014. And you,” he said to Owen, “you’re quite probably Owen Lafayette Grady, and you were born on June 21, 1979 in Minnesota to Maximilian and Wendy Grady, and graduated from Purdue with a degree in zoology. Then you enlisted in the US Navy and became part of their animal training programs. First you trained dolphins and then at some point in your time in the Navy you were recruited into the SEALs. Then you received an honourable discharge and went back to Minnesota as a fowler for their Parks and Recreation Department before being recruited into InGen’s private security division. On your official file you’re listed as a special handler, which I can only assume is about training dinosaurs or something like that.”

“How did you know this much information about us?” Claire asked.

“I did a little research on my own,” Katsouranis said. “It helps to know the people I’m going to be working with in the next few days. Look, I’m not going to sugar-coat this or anything,” he added. “We need your help. A plane of ours has crashed on Isla Sorna. We believe there may be survivors, but we have no idea on what to expect there.”

“What makes you think that we can help you out with that?” Owen asked. “We haven’t been to Sorna in a very long time. The last time I was there was six months ago, when we transferred juveniles from there to Nublar. Also, why don’t you just ask for help from the InGen people on Sorna itself?”

“We’ve done that already,” Katsouranis said. “But your people are busy trying to get a handle on things after the incident in Jurassic World that they told us they didn’t have the personnel to spare. However, they did tell us that there may be some people from Nublar that made it back to Costa Rica who might be able to help us. We looked around, and we found you two.”

“Yes, we get that,” Claire said, “but why us?”

“Well, Mr. Grady will be able to help us know what to expect down there, and you, Ms. Dearing, we’ve found out that you’ve got quite a bit more history with Sorna than you’re saying you are.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You have an aunt, Dr. Victoria Everett, who was a member of the original Jurassic Park’s genetics staff alongside Drs. Henry Wu and Laura Sorkin. After the original park was closed down, Dr. Everett moved to Australia to study the genetics of the local fauna there, and she even participated in a search for a _Megalania_. Unfortunately she died in a plane crash there in 2012. We don’t know much about Dr. Everett’s life during her years with InGen, but we have found out that she took you with her to Isla Sorna, or Site B as it was called then.”

Claire was taken aback by what Katsouranis had just revealed about her aunt. She hadn’t been that close with her Aunt Vicky—kind of like her current relationship with her nephews Zach and Gray—but she did remember her parents asking Aunt Vicky to take her to where she was working, which had turned out to be Site B. Nothing quite as exciting as dinosaurs escaping had happened there when she had been there, and because of that she didn’t think that it was noteworthy enough to mention.

“You’ve been to Site B?” Owen asked her. “I mean, the original park’s Site B? Why didn’t you tell anyone about it? What was it like?”

“It didn’t seem important at the time,” Claire replied. “Also, what’s there to talk about? Site B back then was like the Hammond Lab today: they’re all about making dinosaurs.”

“I think you now have an idea why we need you,” Katsouranis said. “You’ll tell us the kind of dinosaurs we’re to expect,” he said to Owen, “and you’ll guide us around the island itself,” he told Claire.

“Really?” Claire didn’t seem convinced, and basing on his body language, so did Owen. “Sounds like you’re just trying to find reasons to get us there,” she told Katsouranis.

“Well, to be honest, you’re right,” Katsouranis said. “We already have someone who can really help us, but he asked for you two specifically to help him help us out.”

“Do we happen to know this guy?” Claire asked.

“I have a feeling that you might.” Katsouranis turned around and handed the two an iPad showing a video clip. “That video shows the flight path of our plane in the moments before it crashed on Sorna,” he said. “You can see that they’re flying high and straight until just as they reach the coast of Sorna. After that, they made a rapid descent and began flying some irregular loops over the northern part of the island.” The video played some kind of graphical representation of what Katsouranis had just said, with the plane tracing out a flight path from Managua, Nicaragua to Isla Sorna, and then as the plane descended, the line behind the plane figure turned from dark blue to light green, and the plane made some looping circuits over the northern part of the island. This went on for a few seconds before the plane suddenly disappeared.

“I’m sorry to say this, man, but I don’t think you’re going to get much help from us,” Owen said. “You said that your plane crashed in northern Sorna, right? Well, we haven’t been there at all. It’s like a restricted zone even for InGen and J-World employees like us.”

“I’m afraid there isn’t much the two of you can do about it,” Katsouranis said. “Our main contact with InGen is very insistent that you two come with us for this.”

“Who’s onboard that plane, anyway?” Claire asked. “I mean, we know that Sorna is an island full of dinosaurs and all, but you seem to really want to get there and save whoever was on the plane.”

Katsouranis turned to face them and said, in a grave voice, “What follows should never leave the confines of this vehicle. Do you by any chance know Irene and Matthew Pardew?”

“Yeah, I do,” Owen replied. Claire turned to look at him, and he said, “They’ve got this travel show with a twist called _Travelsick_. It’s a good show, actually. Not that you would know about it, what with you being stuck in your books and ledgers and stuff.” That earned him an elbow to the gut from Claire.

“Wait a minute,” Owen said to Katsouranis. “You mean to tell us that Irene and Matthew Pardew are part of Pardew Applications?”

“They’re the children of Richard Seamus Pardew,” Katsouranis confirmed. “All we know is that their show got the go-ahead for a second season, and it seems as if they’ve thought that Isla Sorna would be a great season opener. I can’t blame them, though. It is pretty hard to top fighting off Pakistanis with the Indian Army in Kashmir.”

Katsouranis removed his shades and continued. “Look, I’m not going to blame you for being quite suspicious, but sometimes things like these do happen. I don’t think you know this, but Pardew was asked by the Costa Rican government to provide additional security as election season approached. That was way back in February of last year, I believe. The newly elected government then decided that keeping us around is a worthwhile investment, and so that’s why there’re still Pardew personnel here in Costa Rica. The people don’t like it one bit. They’ve been wanting us out of the country ever since the elections were over, but since the government pays us good money, we don’t exactly want to get kicked out. So we can’t really show any signs of weakness, and so Irene and Matt’s disappearance is being kept under wraps. We need to get this wrapped up, and to get them back in the real world ASAP. And also we need to get to them before the dinosaurs, your dinosaurs, do.”

The SUV slid to a halt before a checkpoint. As the driver talked to the guards manning the checkpoint, Owen happened to glance out of the car, and he noticed something odd. “We’re at the port,” he said. “This is the port of Puntarenas. What are we doing here in the port?” Indeed, there was a large sign beside the checkpoint welcoming them, in Spanish and English, to the Port of Puntarenas.

“The port?” Claire parroted. “Mr. Katsouranis, what are we doing here at the port?”

“Time is of the essence, Ms. Dearing,” the man from Pardew replied. “Matthew and Irene have been missing for more than 24 hours now. 25 hours, 18 minutes and 37 seconds, to be exact,” he added while looking at his watch. “They’re adventurers, I know. They take after their old man, but Sorna is a dinosaur preserve. We’re really keen on getting them out of there before the dinosaurs do.”

The SUV was finally allowed to enter the port. They drove past numerous stalls and people selling their wares, which most often meant their day’s catch. They even passed by a group of men carrying a large fish on their shoulders, a fish that was easily enough to feed an infant mosasaur, before they made a right turn and arrived in front of another checkpoint. This time though they didn’t stop, as the guards apparently recognized the vehicle and its occupants to let it through with a wave of a hand and a nod of the head. Once they were in, the guards quickly slid the gates closed once again.

“Don’t be too impressed by our operation,” Katsouranis told the two Jurassic World people. “This is just the people we need to rescue our boss’s kids.”

This gated part of the port was quite different from the one that they had just passed through. The area now resembled an army barracks, with tents and prefabricated buildings arranged in neat rows for both the men and the officers or commanders or whatever private military contractors called their higher-ups. There was a small but well-supplied motor pool beside the tents, but easily the most noticeable object within the “camp” was the cargo ship docked just beside the “camp.” Owen couldn’t help but think: if this was the amount of manpower that Pardew was willing to commit to a simple search-and-rescue operation, how much more could they commit to an actual warzone?

The driver brought the SUV to the pier where the cargo ship was docked. Once the vehicle was stopped, Katsouranis got out, removed his suit jacket and hung it over his right shoulder. Owen and Claire followed him out of the vehicle, and they both couldn’t help but stare up at the ship. “Is she yours?” Owen asked.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Katsouranis replied. “She’s the _Jewel of Esfahan_. Richard Pardew himself bought her from an Indian breaker’s yard for a pittance, and then he had some friends in Russia give her a complete makeover. Of course, that was before that thing in Crimea and Ukraine, so some of the money that he gave might have been used to fund Putin’s adventure in the Black Sea… Anyway, most of her new tricks are a company secret, but I can tell you that her hull’s been reinforced to battleship-grade armor, the better to help her both to withstand attacks and break through ice sheets if need be.”

“What’s with the flag of Iran flying on her stern?” Owen pointed to the Iranian flag flying over the _Jewel of Esfahan_ ’s stern flagstaff.

“At first, that was just for a bit of fun. Then we needed to get into some… sensitive areas quickly and quietly, and it was then that we found out that no one is suspicious that an Iranian-flagged vessel could actually be providing cover for American military operators.”

Katsouranis walked up to the stairs leading up to the ship’s decks. There was a man wearing combat webbing over civilian clothes and a black cap over his head waiting for them. He was packing what looked like an assault rifle with the biggest barrel Owen had ever seen. The barrel looked too big even for the biggest assault rifle calibre, which meant it was probably a semi-automatic shotgun. The man with the semi-auto shotgun saluted Katsouranis, who returned the salute and said, “How goes the ship, Dick?”

“She’s ready to go, Gian,” the man replied. “We’re just waiting for the other people from InGen before casting off.”

“Here they are.” Katsouranis waved his hand at Claire and Owen. “Claire Dearing and Owen Grady, this is Dick Hamada. I wouldn’t say that he’s the head of Pardew Applications’ search and rescue operations, but he is pretty high up in the ranks.”

“Hamada?” Claire asked as they shook hands. “Do you by any chance have a brother working in Jurassic World?”

“Cousin, actually,” Dick Hamada replied. “I know people have told us that we look so much alike that we must be brothers, but unfortunately for them, Katashi and I are just cousins.”

“Well, I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell this to you, but your cousin didn’t make it out of Jurassic World. He was, uh, killed in action while trying to recapture one of our escaped assets—er, dinosaurs.”

“I did have some thoughts on the matter,” Dick said. “It is part of the job, though. You never know which day’s going to be your last. Come on aboard! It’s a four-hour trip to Sorna, and we want to get there while there’s still some light. We’ll need all the light that we can get.”

“Four hours?” Owen asked as their little group began climbing the stairs. “That’s impossible. Sorna’s at least two hundred miles away from Puntarenas. You can’t get there in just four hours unless your ship can get up to sixty knots. Can it?” Owen trailed off as he realized just what exactly the Pardew ship was capable of.

“Company secrets, Mr. Grady,” Katsouranis said.

“So, Dick, huh?” Owen asked Hamada as they continued up the stairs. “What is that, short for Richard or something like that?”

“Dickinson, actually. My parents love poetry, and they really love Emily Dickinson. Hell, they’ve named my sister after her. I guess you can guess how I got my name.” Dickinson Hamada let out a short chuckle on his own misfortune.

“So what did you do before joining Pardew?”

“I was with the Navy, man. I think you’re from the Navy too, am I right? Yeah, after the Navy, I spent some time with the French Foreign Legion after that, and then once I was done with the French, Pardew approached me, and it’s been a steady fat paycheck ever since.”

“The French Foreign Legion? Have you met or seen a guy named Barry Kouassi?”

“I’ve heard of him, but I haven’t really met the guy. Sounds like a good man, though, from what I heard with the other Legionnaires back in the day.”

“Where’d you serve?”

“The usual places: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the works. I also spent some time in Indonesia, the Philippines, Nigeria, Chad, Mali and even Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Why, just a few days ago, my unit was just in northern Iraq, helping the Kurdish peshmerga in their fight against Daesh.” Daesh was another term for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, as it was an acronym made from the first two letters of the self-styled caliphate’s official title: _Dawlat Ishlamiyah_.

“So you must have some experience in SARs in high-risk areas,” Owen commented.

“Sure,” Dickinson said. “But nothing’s prepared me, or frankly every one of us, for a SAR on an island filled with dinosaurs.”

The ship blew its horn as soon as Katsouranis, Hamada, Owen and Claire had set foot on the deck. The Greek led them to a stack of shipping containers in the middle of the deck. Katsouranis reached out to open one of the containers, Owen said, “You’re not telling me that you’ve got some kind of control center in one of these containers, are you?”

“It’s actually a clever disguise,” Katsouranis said. “The real control center is deeper inside.” Katsouranis opened the doors to reveal that the stacked containers were not actual containers but rather just large metal plates made to look like stacked containers when put up on the deck. The space was actually big and hollow, and two different types of helicopters were inside the space made by the containers. Their rotor blades had been removed because they wouldn’t be able to fit inside, but otherwise they looked ready to take off at a moment’s notice. More Pardew people were inside preparing equipment and the like for their coming insertion into Isla Sorna.

“We’ve got another guest in here today,” Katsouranis said. “He’s the other InGen man that I’ve been talking about earlier. I think you might know him.”

There was a table to the side of the space, and what appeared to be maps were on top of the table. A man was standing beside the table, and his back was turned away from the visitors. As they got closer, Claire recognized the black turtleneck sweater that the man was wearing. “Henry?” she asked.

The man turned around to reveal that he was indeed Henry Wu, head geneticist of both Jurassic World and International Genetics. “Claire,” he said in greeting. “And Mr. Grady. You’re both finally here.”

“Wu, you sneaky bastard.” Out of nowhere, Owen walked over to the scientist and slammed his fist into the other man’s jaw. Wu staggered back and leaned on the table to regain his balance as he cradled his jaw. To his credit though, he managed not to fall over.

“That was for my raptors, you son of a bitch,” Owen said. “For not telling anyone that you added raptor DNA to your goddamned hybrid. I lost almost the whole pack because of the _Indominus_. _Your_ _Indominus_ , Wu.”

As Claire moved to step between the two men, she noticed that Katsouranis and Dick Hamada were watching the unfolding scene but not doing anything to keep the argument from possibly escalating into a fight. Katsouranis even looked like he had a small grin on his lips. Meanwhile, Wu had begun laughing, and that irritated Owen even more, making him determined to land another punch on the scientist’s face, but Claire held him back.

“I guess I deserved that one,” Wu finally said. “But don’t blame me; blame Masrani. He’s the one who wanted the bigger, badder and crueller dinosaur, and he got it.”

“So you were just following orders, huh?” Owen retorted. “Passing the blame to a guy who’s already dead? That’s pretty low for you, Henry.”

“Gentlemen, now is not the time,” Claire said.

“It all makes sense now,” Owen continued. “Hoskins’ obsession with the raptors; the raptor DNA in the _Indominus_ ; those plans for the raptor-sized _Indominuses_ , or _Indomini_ , or whatever their plural is… That’s why the fat bastard was taking all those samples and embryos from the lab. Hoskins’ men told you about us just before we fled. I know now why you wanted us to go along with you. You’re tying up loose ends, aren’t you, Henry? You’ve got these guys pretending to be looking for some plane crash in Sorna, and then once we’re far enough to sea you’re gonna have us killed and our bodies dumped into the sea, right?”

“All right, Grady, now you’re just going paranoid and letting your mind and mouth run off,” Wu countered. “Believe it or not, I don’t know these people too. I’m here for the same reasons you are: they need some people to help them around Sorna, and they got me. Besides, what do I have to gain by having you two killed? It’s actually going to be a net loss because it’s just child’s play in rebuilding J-World, and even if that doesn’t happen, I’m sure you two will have good futures in Japan or Europe.” He sighed and then continued, “Okay, so Vic and I have been working together to create dinosaurs as soldiers. What are you going to do about it?”

“Oh, you wanna see me do something about it?” Owen made to punch Wu once again, and the scientist stood firm against the coming attack, but Claire had had enough of them.

“That’s enough!” she almost shouted. “Seriously, Owen, Henry, are you two going to fight just because of your little differences!? Pull yourselves together and show some respect for yourselves! Owen, put a lid on it, take a deep breath, back off and walk it away. And you, Henry, you’ve got some explaining to do to me, and to all of us. We saw the specimens in your lab and office, and the blueprints. I saw them all. And Hoskins and his men were taking it all with them. What have you been up to all this time?”

Wu leaned back on the table once again, this time on his own accord. “Those specimens that you saw in the lab were just side projects of mine, some proofs-of-concept, if you will. I’m just testing new techniques in manipulating DNA. What, did you think making the _Indominus_ was just a matter of slapping together the bits of DNA that I needed to create a hybrid organism? It’s not that easy. If you want to create a hybrid from two massively different species, you have to find the pieces of DNA that code for specific parts and traits from both species, look for and remove redundancies, cut out the excess and start from scratch when you find out you’ve been doing it the wrong way this whole time.

“As for why I’m here, I’ve said it just moments ago: they need people who’ve been on Sorna. I know that you’ve been to Sorna, Claire. Your aunt Victoria brought you to Site B, didn’t she? I remember, because I was there too when you were there. But I bring more to the table, because I haven’t just been on Sorna; I know that island like the back of my hand.

“John Hammond bought Sorna from the Costa Ricans just a year after buying Nublar. Once he’d decided that Nublar was going to be the site of Jurassic Park, most of our industrial cloning processes were moved to Sorna, and we established Site B. We perfected our cloning processes there, and then once we’d done that, Sorna became our playground, our sandbox. We were free to create whatever we wanted there.”

“Maybe that was the problem with you people,” Owen said. “I mean, once you knew how to clone dinosaurs, it’s all about ‘could I clone this or that?’ instead of ‘should I clone this?’” When the others turned to look at him, he added, “Ian Malcolm has a perfectly valid point about that, you know?”

Wu shook his head and continued. “Anyway, while we were producing orgs for the park itself, we went off on some side projects of our own. I worked on perfecting Version 4.4 just in case Hammond felt that it was time to upgrade our attractions—“

“Orgs? Version 4.4? Upgrades?” Owen couldn’t help but chuckle. “You really have no feeling for the animals that you’re bringing back to life, do you?” Owen then shook his head and walked away once again.

“I had some Version 4.4 orgs in the pipeline in Sorna,” Wu continued. “Laura—Dr. Sorkin—continued refining her technique in using pure and authentic dinosaur DNA to create orgs without using the DNA of other animals. Victoria—Dr. Everett—meanwhile, she was working on creating a hybrid.”

“A hybrid dinosaur?” Claire asked. This was the first time that she had known that her aunt was involved in that kind of business with InGen. “You were already thinking of making hybrids back then?”

“Of course,” Wu replied. “Even back then, we had predicted that there will come a time when the public will grow tired or desensitized of our attractions, meaning that we’ll have to give them something quite new and unexpected. Anyway, Clarissa came, we abandoned Site B, and the dinosaurs were let loose. Now, we’ve estimated that there are at least thirty to forty different species of dinosaur living on Sorna. The herbivores mostly live in the perimeter of the island, with the carnivores sticking to center of Sorna. There is one exception to that rule, though, and that is the northern part of Sorna, where your plane crashed,” he said to Katsouranis. “We call that place Carnivore Country because that’s what it is, to be honest. You won’t find a lot of herbivores there because they’ll get eaten at the first possible opportunity by the orgs living there. We know that there are dilophosaurs, raptors, compys, a breeding pair of tyrannosaurs, and some kind of large org that we haven’t matched up to any species on our list.

“It’s basically the worst place to crash into,” Wu continued. “The chances of survival, provided that you made it alive through the crash, are very, very slim. All dinosaurs there are bloodthirsty seeing as they don’t have a steady supply of prey. God forbid if something happens there that makes you bleed.”

“Well, thank God my period just ended three days ago,” Claire muttered under her breath with a hint of sarcasm.


	4. Dino Fight!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Claire, Owen and the Pardew PMC arrive on Isla Sorna to search for survivors of the crash of a company private jet but the search is inevitably disrupted by the arrival of dinosaurs.

They’d arrived off the coast of Sorna at four in the afternoon, just as Katsouranis had said they would. The _Jewel of Esfahan_ was anchored just a few miles away from the sandy beaches of the island’s northern shores. The ship’s crew had removed the steel panels that hid the two helipads on the ship’s deck from curious eyes minutes after the ship had stopped and it was possible to walk the decks without the risk of getting blown overboard. There were two helicopters that had been hidden within the “containers,” an MH-6 Little Bird and an UH-1 Iroquois, the venerable Huey that was one of the icons of the Vietnam War. Both choppers had been painted a flat grey, but someone had decided that they needed that little touch of color on their fuselages, and that little touch of color had turned out to be birds, Angry Birds and Flappy Birds, to be exact.

The Pardew contractors would be sending a very small force, or “stick,” into Isla Sorna first, and their InGen “advisors” would be along for the ride. Wu would be with Katsouranis on the Little Bird, while Owen and Claire would be on the Huey with the contractors, led by Dickinson Hamada. Someone had somehow managed to get Owen’s Marlin 1895 from wherever he had hidden it back in Costa Rica and brought it on the ship, and while his was not to reason why, he was damned glad that he had his gun with him.

The op in itself was simple: get to the crash site, land the contractors and the “advisors” on-site while the Little Bird provided overwatch, find the Pardews and their buddies if they were still alive, and bring them all back to the ship. Even though the contractors already knew their employers’ children’s faces, Dick Hamada had allowed Owen and Claire to look at some photos of the four that the contractors would be looking for. In the end, they’d settled on thinking of who they looked like to remember what they actually looked like.

The simple and brutal truth, though, is that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, and while no one knew what form the enemy would take today, they were definitely on the lookout for it to rear its ugly head.

Dickinson Hamada was very painfully aware of that statement. Born and raised in Hawaii to second-generation Japanese immigrants, he had looked to the armed forces, and the Navy in particular, as a means of getting out of his current situation. But when he had entered the Navy, there were some things that he couldn’t help but notice, such as the subject of Pearl Harbor and the whole Pacific campaign of World War Two always coming up whenever he went into a place, and never getting promoted above the rank of seaman despite being, according to his more open-minded colleagues, being “quite a damn fine seaman and petty officer.” Eventually Dick Hamada made the fateful decision to desert from the Navy. Using assumed names, he fled Hawaii for anyplace else, all the while cursing himself for not following the footsteps of his cousin Katashi and becoming a game warden for the state police.

Hamada then found himself in Europe, France specifically. He drifted through the streets of Paris before deciding to join the French Foreign Legion. Like many others before him, he had joined the Legion as a chance to start anew. Indeed, after going through quite literally the toughest training course ever devised by man, Dickinson Hamada had felt an entirely new man once he had accepted his commission into the Legion.

During his six years in the Legion, Hamada had then been deployed to various places around the world like Algeria, Mali, Somalia, French Guiana, and other places that had once been part of France’s vast colonial empire. Mostly they did policing duties, keeping the natives placated by flying the tricolour on their land, but sometimes they also went on combat missions. One particular mission that stuck out in Hamada’s mind had been during the northern Mali conflict of 2013. A combined Malian and Foreign Legion force had been tasked with defending the historic city of Timbuktu from Islamist rebels. The battle of Timbuktu had been intense, if one considered sporadic firefights between small groups—meaning five to ten people—intense. But Hamada did remember that while on patrol through the streets of Timbuktu, they had been ambushed by a bunch of rebels. To say that he had barely survived was accurate, as one of the first bullets that had been fired in the ambush went through the space that his head had just occupied a mere second earlier.

Once he had decided to end his time with the Legion due to homesickness among other factors, Dickinson realized that he couldn’t set foot on American soil anymore, not if he didn’t want to end up in a jail cell. He was still wanted for desertion after all, and a court martial waited for him on American soil. In all honesty, he was at a loss at what to do until Giannis Katsouranis and Pardew Protection Applications came along and offered him a job as a private security contractor. Sure, it was a return to all sorts of military duties, but by that point Dickinson knew little except fighting, and if he was gonna fight, he might as well fight for something.

Once he had become part of Pardew, Hamada had been involved in the fighting in both eastern Ukraine and Iraqi Kurdistan, fighting the pro-Russian separatists and the radical fundamentalist Islamists of the Islamic State respectively. Now he was about to go into an island filled with dinosaurs. In all honesty, he would have preferred facing an entire battalion of separatists or Islamists over a single dinosaur. Especially if the dinosaur was a _Tyrannosaurus rex_.

Not that his companions were any less competent. There were three other contractors in the Huey with him and the InGen “advisors.” They were all former members of the armed forces, and they had joined Pardew for varied reasons. Dick was sure that the higher income of being a private contractor as compared to an actual serving member of the army had something to do with their decisions. But just because they had gone for the option with more money didn’t mean that they weren’t good fighters and warriors too. Private security was a very dangerous job after all, and Pardew made sure that its employees were well compensated.

“Just four guys for a SAR?” Owen asked Hamada as they prepared to board the Huey. “And how exactly are we supposed to get the Pardew kids and their buddies back to the ship?”

“We’re good at what we do, Mr. Grady,” Hamada replied. “Also, our job is just to look for them and secure the site. If—when—we find them, we’ve got another chopper here that’ll go and pick them up. If we don’t see them, we just look around as long as we can.”

The ship’s deck began to get noisy as the engines of the Huey and the Little Bird spooled to life. Just as the pilots were given the thumbs-up to lift off of the deck, the windsock filled up in a direction perpendicular to that which the choppers were facing. “Looks like we’ll be getting some crosswinds coming up,” Hamada said on the intercom. “Hold on to your butts,” he added with a grin.

The Huey lifted off of the deck with a shudder, and Claire’s hand suddenly gripped Owen’s arm. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “What are you afraid of? Flying or helicopters?”

“Not really,” Claire replied. “It’s just that Mr. Masrani had flown me to the paddock yesterday when he was still not yet fully qualified to fly.” Was it just yesterday? Claire asked herself. It had felt like it had all happened sixty-five million years ago.

“Don’t worry, ma’am,” Hamada said. “I’m sure Millsap here is quite the helicopter pilot. Ain’t that right, Millsap?”

“Yes siree, Dick,” Millsap, the pilot, replied.

Soon the two helicopters were able to fly above the crosswind, and they formed up and then flew in formation towards Sorna. The flight there was mostly quiet, with no one speaking more than what absolutely had to be said. Ten minutes later they were “feet dry,” meaning they were now flying over land instead of water. At first glance, Sorna seemed untouched by any moving life, and then once they cleared the beaches and the eroded rim of the ancient caldera that had formed Sorna, the island opened itself up to them. Below they could see massive herds of herbivorous dinosaurs from sauropods to hadrosaurs to ceratopsians all moving in one huge biomass through the grasslands of the island. It was a sight that would have warmed any dinosaur lover’s heart.

“If only people could see the dinosaurs like this,” Owen said. “Living together without boundaries.” He then turned to look at Claire and added,” Wait a minute, I know that look. Don’t tell me. When J-World’s back online, there’ll be helicopter tours over Nublar while everyone else’s still busy renovating Main Street.”

Claire slapped his thigh in response. “I was just joking!” he backpedalled.

“It’s not a joke because it’s not funny,” Claire said, but the hint of a smile on her lips was enough to tell him that maybe she did find it funny after all.

As they flew deeper into Sorna, a tyrannosaurus poked its head out of the forest canopy and let loose a great roar at the two mysterious flying objects intruding in its territory. This time it was Owen who gripped tightly the edge of his seat. The memories of last night’s fight—was it just last night?—were still fresh in his mind, and while he had succeeded—not by much, to be honest—to push the scenes of the two rexes fighting each other to the back of his mind, the tyrannosaur’s bellowing roar brought the memories all back to the forefront of his consciousness. Every man feared death, and Owen Grady was no exception. That night in Jurassic World, the battle between the _Indominus_ and the _Tyrannousaurus_ and the _Velociraptor_ s on Main Street while the helpless humans could only watch and try not to get stepped on or fallen upon. Seeing as the tyrannosaur had weighed eight tons, being human paste under a _T. rex_ foot wasn’t the best way to go, admittedly.

Owen tried to force the memories of last night back to the back of his mind by focusing on the task at hand. “How far are we from the crash site?” he asked.

“GPS says that we should be on top of it any minute now,” Dick Hamada replied. “But right now I’m not seeing anything that looks like an open field or something like it—hang on, I see it now.”

Because the trees were taller on the side they were coming from, it had looked like there was no clearing there, just lush forest, but once they had cleared the treetops they could see a large field of brown mud flanked by forest on all sides. A few hardy trees had managed to grow up from the thick muddy soil, and in between those few and scattered trees was the wreckage of a business jet. The tail and rudder, along with a portion of the rear fuselage, had managed to survive the impact intact, but the same couldn’t be said for the rest of the plane. That had seemingly disintegrated upon impact with the ground. Only a miracle or being in the rear of the plane when it crashed could have made someone survive that crash.

“Set us down near the rudder,” Hamada ordered. The pilot nodded and brought the Huey closer to the rudder, the largest bit of wreckage still intact on the site. The pilot brought the Huey to a hover just a few feet beside the tail and then softly set it down on the muddy ground. The Pardew contractors moved quickly out of the helicopter as soon as it was on the ground. Owen and Claire followed them out soon after, and once everyone was off, the pilot lifted off the chopper and then began flying a loop over the crash site.

Owen reached for something behind him and brought out a canteen that he had “borrowed” from the _Esfahan_. He unscrewed the cap and took a deep drink. He wouldn’t call himself an alcoholic, but he had indulged himself with occasional sips from the bottle once he found out that he was going to be working with dinosaurs in general and velociraptors in particular. It was the sort of situation where it made more sense when he was slightly drunk than when he was sober. No one else; meaning no one who wasn’t supposed to know; had managed to pick up on it, although Claire had found out about it recently when they had gone into Nublar’s restricted area to look for her nephews.

Claire saw him taking a sip out of the canteen now, however, and she asked, “Are you drinking again?”

“Just a sip,” Owen replied as he capped the canteen and returned it to his belt. “Nothing that will make me too drunk to walk.”

Their small group had gone closer to the rudder section of the plane. At first glance, it looked much like one would expect of plane parts that had survived a crash. Upon closer inspection however, some, if not most of the scratches and dents didn’t look like they had been made by sudden contact and impact with the ground. Dickinson Hamada had seen his fair share of plane crashes—hell, he’d been on a chopper that had been shot down by ISIS forces back in Iraq—and he had never seen crash damage like what he was seeing now. He reached out to touch one of the scratches, and he felt some kind of rectangular indentations within it. Somehow it reminded him of teeth, and he shivered unconsciously.

Beyond the plane’s tail, Owen had noticed something on the mud near some seats that had been ejected from the wreckage. There was some kind of hiking boot near the seats, along with a large three-toed footprint. “Looks like someone fed a rex,” he muttered. The hiking boot looked to be a man’s shoe, so that was one of the people on the plane accounted for. A walk through the site revealed little more than that boot, but then again he didn’t expect there to be any. People liked to imagine kill sites as being very bloody and strewn with bits from whatever had become the hunter’s latest meal, but that simply wasn’t true. Owen had heard stories from when Masrani and InGen had gone back to Nublar to clear the way for Jurassic World. The old rex was still wandering the island, and when the hunters had confronted her, the rex had taken one of the hunters, threw him into the air and quite literally swallowed the poor bastard whole. A _T. rex_ was entirely capable of eating a human and leaving behind little to no evidence of the kill having happened.

Then Owen noticed a set of shoeprints coming from the fuselage. This set of prints had gone in circles before going back into the wreckage, and then whoever had made those prints had gone out of the wreckage once again and met up with another larger pair of shoeprints. The two sets then went off into the jungle, following two other sets of prints that had already gone into the forest ahead of them.

Something didn’t add up, at least to Owen’s mind. Four sets of footprints obviously meant four people. There were four people onboard the Pardew jet when it had crashed. That meant that all four people onboard the plane had survived the crash. Then who was the unlucky bastard that had been eaten?

“How many people did you say were on this plane of yours?” Owen asked Dick Hamada.

“Four,” the Pardew contractor replied. “Why?”

“See these tracks?” Owen pointed at the shoeprints in question. “That’s four people making it through the crash and running off into the forest. But see that boot over there, and the big footprint beside it? That means that at least one person got eaten. It doesn’t add up.”

“You’re right,” Hamada said. “Our people in Atlanta said that they saw only Matt, Irene and their two buddies get on the plane. They must have picked up at least one person in either San Jose or Managua. Shit, that probably explains the stopovers. The plane’s got enough range to get from Atlanta to Sorna direct, so stopping over to pick up some people explains the stopovers in Costa Rica and Nicaragua.”

Hamada then reached for the radio clipped to the right shoulder strap of his webbing and called out to the helicopters orbiting above them. “Angry Bird, this is Collector,” he said. “We’ve found some tracks leading into the forest due north. Request that you turn on your infrared and take a look at the forest. Our guests don’t want to go in there until we know what’s in there.”

Onboard the Little Bird, whose callsign was “Angry Bird,” Katsouranis nodded to the Little Bird’s pilot, who flicked a switch on the instrumentation panel. A flat iPad-like device on Katsouranis’ lap turned on and showed the clearing through the infrared spectrum. On it he could see the six people that had come from the Huey shining a bright white on the IR, in contrast to the ground itself, which was a deep blue that was almost black. Large three-toed footprints that had obviously come from some kind of large animal glowed orange and red on the IR due to the residual body heat that had been transferred to the ground. “Okay, Collector, we’ve got you on our screen,” he told Hamada. “There’s nothing in the forest north except for some kind of large heat signature. It’s a structure of some kind, not an animal if that’s what you were asking.”

Back down on the ground, the people there a soft hooting coming from the trees to the west. Hamada looked up at where he had heard the hooting coming from and asked, “Owls?”

“ _Dilophosaurus_ ,” Owen and Claire replied at the same time. Anywhere else on earth, owls could and would have probably explained the hooting. But here on Sorna, there was only one species of dinosaur that made such a hooting cry, and that was _Dilophosaurus wetherilli_. Thanks to Jurassic World, everyone thought that all dilophosaurs were venomous, had large retractable neck frills and looked like dromeosaurid dinosaurs like _Velociraptor_. Which was all a big stinking heap of crap, as real palaeontologists know that dilophosaurs actually had no neck frills and weren’t even poisonous in the first place. As for their looks, there was some kind of gap between their front teeth and their main teeth that was quite obvious on fossilized specimens but not included in the Jurassic World “resurrection” of this particular species of dinosaur. And once again it was all Henry Wu’s fault, as he had all but admitted to using frilled-neck lizard and spitting cobra DNA to fill in the gaps in the actual dilophosaur genome.

“ _Dilophosaurus_? Are those dangerous?” Hamada asked.

“Very,” Owen replied. “They’re man-sized; they’re venomous; they can spit up to fifty meters away, and they won’t hesitate to attack humans.”

“What are we supposed to do now?”

“Uh… hide!” Just as Owen had said that, a dilophosaur peeked out of the trees. It had a pair of red crests on the top of its snout. There was some kind of gap or notch between its three front-most teeth and the rest of its teeth. A cold, yellow reptilian eye blinked in its socket, and the dinosaur let out a hooting cry. This was answered by at least five more hoots, followed by an equal number of animals poking their heads out of the trees.

It was an entire pack of dilophosaurs about to come into the clearing.

“This just keeps getting better and better,” Owen muttered. He, Claire and the Pardew contractors then bolted for the eastern side of the clearing just as the dilophosaurs burst out of the western side. The dilos were the color of human flesh, at least humans of the Caucasian variety. Their underbellies were white and red streaks ran from their eye sockets down to their necks. The dilophosaur in front had very bright red nasal crests, leading Owen to assume that that was this particular pack’s alpha.

“Angry Bird, this is Collector,” Hamada almost whispered into his radio. “Get Flappy Bird down here for an exfil.” “Flappy Bird” was the callsign of the Huey that had dropped them off just minutes earlier.

“Collector, this is Angry Bird,” Katsouranis said from the Little Bird. “We’re picking up medium-sized heat signatures coming towards you. You may want to find another place to hide!”

At that moment, their small group was just about to slip into the trees to the east of the clearing when they saw a large shadow moving through the woods. They stopped in their tracks, and just in time, as the shadow between the trees finally resolved itself into a kind of massive raptor-like dinosaur. This one looked like an eight-meter version of a velociraptor, except this dinosaur looked more like an _Oviraptor_ than a _Velociraptor_ when it comes to the head. Also, this dinosaur had feather-like bristles covering almost the entirety of its body except for the head and the feet. The twelve-inch sickle claw shone dully in the light of the setting sun. It was a gigantic raptor. It was a _Gigantoraptor_.

The gigantoraptor let out a loud barking call, similar to a velociraptor’s but deeper in timbre. Three more gigantoraptors replied the call, and these three raptors popped out of the trees behind the alpha gigantoraptor. There were still more raptors in the trees.

“Back away slowly,” Owen hissed. Their little group retraced their steps without taking their eyes off of the gigantoraptors. Owen dared a short glance back at the dilophosaurs, who had grown agitated once the gigantoraptors had made their presence known. _I really hope they fight against each other_ , he thought. _I wouldn’t want to become a dilo-raptor sandwich._

Luckily for them, it looked as if the dilophosaurs and the gigantoraptors were more interested in each other than the humans standing in between them. The alpha gigantoraptor raised its arms, ruffled its proto-feathers and screeched. The alpha dilophosaurus replied with a screech of its own, although this one sounded like it had phlegm stuck in its throat. Owen half-expected the animal to raise up its neck frill and spit its venom, but instead the alpha dilo’s nasal crests only turned bright red, the color of arterial blood.

The alpha dilophosaur stomped his right foot, and the alpha gigantoraptor did the same. The alpha dilo turned to his packmates and let out a long hoot, and the alpha gigantoraptor did the same with his own packmates, but with barking instead of hooting. The two packs then faced each other, roared as loudly as they all could, and then they rushed towards each other.


	5. Into the Forest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The search and rescue mission turns deadly almost immediately once dinosaurs arrive to investigate the crash site.

“Tell your people to get out of here, and quick!” Owen told Dick Hamada as the dilophosaurs and gigantoraptors began fighting right in the middle of the crash site. “Things are going to get bad really soon!”

Hamada relayed the orders on the radio, and the Pardew contractors split up in different directions. Owen, Claire, and Dickinson ended up jumping behind a large fallen tree on the northern edge of the clearing from which they had a good view of the two alpha dinosaurs fighting each other.

“Did you see that?” Claire asked Owen in a low tone. “Those dilos don’t have frills and venom!”

“I know, right? And those giant raptors are all feathered!” Owen said in agreement. “There’s no way that J-World or the old InGen made these animals. And last time I looked, _Gigantoraptor_ wasn’t on InGen’s list. Both lists, in fact.”

“Hang on a minute there,” Dick interrupted them. “What are you guys talking about? No frills? Feathered raptors? What the hell is going on?”

“It’s a long story,” Claire said in reply. “But, long story short, there are organisms here on Sorna that neither InGen nor Masrani created.”

“I hate to think about what else is in store for us,” Owen muttered to himself.

Dickinson’s radio crackled with static once again. “Collector, this is Angry Bird,” Giannis Katsouranis said, his voice on the radio scratchy. “Things have gotten very confusing down there. Is there any place for Flappy Bird to set down?”

“We’re watching dinosaurs fighting here, Gian, believe it or not,” Dick replied. “And I don’t think we’re gonna be finding anyplace for Flappy Bird to land anytime soon.”

“Hang on, Dick, we’re gonna be clearing up some space for you,” Katsouranis said.

“Roger that.” Then, to the InGen people, he told them, “Get ready! We’re going loud!”

“Wait, what?” Owen asked. “What are you going to do? Shoot the animals?”

“It’s the only way we can get out here, man!”

“No! There’s got to be another way!” And just like that, Owen leaped up from behind the log and ran back out into the clearing, waving his hands at the choppers and shouting at them to stop. “Owen, get back here!” Claire shouted.

“There’s nothing else we can do anymore, Grady!” Dickinson shouted to no effect. “Shit! He’s not gonna listen to anyone except himself. Have you ever fired a gun before?” he suddenly asked Claire.

“What? No! Does a tranquilizer gun count?” Claire blurted out in reply.

“I thought so. Okay, this is what you’re going to do,’ Dickinson told her. “You go get out there and drag your boyfriend’s ass right back here, or else he’ll end up in pieces because of the dinosaurs or the Little Birds. Don’t worry, I’ll cover you. That’s why I asked you if you could shoot in the first place.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Claire countered.

“Just go!”

Owen waved his arms as fast as he could at the approaching Little Bird, which was already lining up a shot on the two fighting alphas. He shouted at the top of his lungs, “No! Don’t shoot!” But even as he kept his distance from the dinosaurs, he saw that he was too late; the Little Bird had fired off a pair of unguided rockets at the dueling dinosaurs, and then everything began to happen in slow motion for Owen. The rockets exploded just a few meters above the ground, and the twin fireballs from their explosions threw him and the dinosaurs back by several feet.

Owen slipped in and out of consciousness throughout, but during the brief periods that he was vaguely awake, he could remember seeing sights that he would never ever forget, not in this life anyway. He saw one of the Pardew contractors running right in between two fighting dinosaurs, and the man disappeared between the jaws of those dinosaurs. He also saw a hapless dilophosaur get torn apart by the twin miniguns mounted on the Little Bird’s hardpoints, bullet holes appearing on the animal’s body and giving it the appearance of Swiss cheese. Owen felt hands tugging at his shirt, and he looked up and saw Claire and Dick pulling him away from what was rapidly turning into a battlefield.

Claire shouted something that Owen in his shell-shocked state couldn’t understand, and then he felt himself drop back onto the ground as Dick let go of him and began firing his USAS-12. And even though Owen couldn’t hear what they were saying, Dick’s hand gestures were more than enough to tell him that the Pardew contractor wanted them out of Dodge ASAP. By then, Owen had regained some control of his arms and legs, and he hauled himself up onto his feet with Claire’s help, but they had only made a few steps towards the trees when another explosion sent them back on their knees.

This time, Owen was unconscious for longer than he felt his eyes were open. He had only brief flashes of memory from this time and some of them were very confusing. One was that he somehow remembered seeing Dick flying before the explosion had happened, and a part of his brain was telling him that that particular memory made no sense. Then there was also an image of Dick Hamada leaning back on a tree with a large red wound on his chest and a Colt M1911A1 pistol in his hand. He was saying something but Owen couldn’t hear the words. When his hearing returned, all he heard was the sound of the Colt firing and the dinosaurs roaring.

Two consecutive explosions had not been very kind on Owen’s body and mind. As he staggered into the forest under Claire’s help and guidance, random thoughts floated freely in Owen’s mind. And what he had thought was just an overused cliché was actually turning out to be true: he could see his life flashing before his eyes. He could see his childhood home in Minnesota, all the regular college shit that he and his friends did at Purdue, his enlistment into the Navy, spending time with the Navy’s search-and-rescue dolphins, and then training to become a Navy SEAL and all the missions that he had been in, including the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. Some of the more recent events in his life also flew through his mind’s eye: running from the _Indominus_ , being chased by his own raptors, and then ending up on “the other island” against all common sense. Then again, sometimes common sense left even the most sensible people, and Owen considered himself quite the sensible man.

Owen next found himself lying down on a patch of bare and flattened grass with Claire standing over him. He felt his lips move but he couldn’t hear what he had said. Slowly, Claire brought up her right hand and began to swing, and once her palm hit Owen’s cheek, the world went back to its normal pace. “What the hell was that for!?” he demanded as he sat up and began rubbing his face.

“I had to knock some sense back into you, Grady,” Claire said, referring to Owen by his surname. “You were getting very incoherent.”

“What made you think that, Dearing?” She only used surnames when talking to people who had made her angry or frustrated, of which Owen had done a lot during their brief and ill-fated relationship.

“You told me that I was beautiful.”

Owen winced. “Shit, I said that?” he asked in disbelief.

“Yes,” Claire said, looking at Owen directly with those piercing green eyes. Claire had never been a good liar, which had made things both easy and hard for the two of them.

“Ah, shit,” Owen muttered. He pinched the bridge of his nose and then he said, “What happened back there?”

“Everything’s a mess,” Claire replied. “It’s all chaotic and gone to hell.”

“What happened to Dick?”

“I saw him get kicked by one of those huge raptor-like creatures, and then one of their helicopters fired a rocket at the dinosaur. He was still firing his gun last time that I saw him.”

“Poor bastard,” Owen said. “He just can’t get a break with dinosaurs, can he? His cousin gets killed by a genetically engineered dinosaur, and then he gets kicked in the chest by another genetically engineered dinosaur.” He then looked around and saw that they were in the forest, on a trail of flattened grass and vegetation which he knew was a game trail. “Now where the hell are we?” he asked, more to himself than to Claire, who nevertheless responded.

“We’re north of the place where the plane crashed,” she said. “I thought that this trail was a good place to stop and rest.”

“Yeah, well, not for long,” Owen said. The trail was wide enough for a vehicle to pass through, meaning it had probably been laid out as a road back in the days of the old Site B, but the jungle had reclaimed most of the path by now. However, there were footprints that had been hardened into the mud and soil by the hot tropical sun, and Owen recognized the prints as coming from carnivorous dinosaurs. “If we don’t get off this trail soon, we’re going to end up meeting carnivores, and it’s not going to end well for us.” Owen stood up and then looked around. “Where’s my gun?” he asked.

“I got it,” Claire said, taking Owen’s lever-action rifle by its sling and handing it over to him. “God, that thing is so heavy!”

Owen slung his gun on his left shoulder. “No time to waste,” he said as he started walking. Claire quickly followed behind him. The barking howls of raptors and other animals echoed through the jungle on the sides of the trail, and Owen’s legs unconsciously began speeding up. Claire struggled to keep up.

They had been walking for what had felt like an hour but was actually just fifteen minutes when they encountered a large brown pyramid-shaped mass which was being swarmed by flies. “Oh, this just keeps getting better and better,” Owen muttered.

“Is that what I think it is?” Claire asked.

“Yep. That big pile of shit right there is a territorial marker. We’re now in some very big carnivore’s territory.”

“Should we turn around, go back the way we came?”

“No, no.” Owen shook his head. “The dilos and gigantoraptors are still there. I’d rather face one big guy than a lot of small guys.” They went past the dung pile and down the game trail. The two of then rounded a bend in the trail and then they saw what was in front of them and stopped.

There was a large building, almost like a warehouse, right in front of them. The walls had once been painted white but were now covered in vines, leaves, and some kind of brown stuff which could be dried blood. A large metal sliding door at the front of the building, similar to a garage door, now sported a massive hole right in its middle, easily big enough for a full adult Tyrannosaurus to pass through. The game trail branched off, with one fork going into the hole and the other continuing deeper into the forest. A smaller door, also made of metal but probably of a much sturdier design, was off to the side of the structure.

“What the hell is this place?” Owen asked out loud.

“It can’t be from the old Site B,” Claire said. “It’s not as overgrown as the old site, and it looks too, well, modern,” she said as she searched for the right word to describe it.

A massive roar somewhere in the distance rumbled the air and reached their ears. Owen seemed to have recognized the roar because his face showed a subtle hint of fear and terror that was now coursing through his veins. He then grabbed Claire’s arm and together they ran for the small door on the warehouse’s side.

“Do you know what made that roar?” Claire asked him as they ran.

“No, not really,” Owen admitted, “but it’s definitely something very, very big. It probably also made the whole on the side of this place as well.” They had finally reached the door, which showed some signs of rusting at the hinges and on some spots on the front, but otherwise it looked sturdy. Owen reached for the rust-coated handle and turned it. The handle moved freely and, with just a little tug, the door swung open. “Unlocked,” he muttered. “What a surprise.”

“Do you think whoever was last here left in a hurry?” Claire asked.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if whatever made that hole over there had something to do with it. Come on!” As another roar shook the forest, Owen took Claire by the arm once again and hauled her inside, and she had to grab the handle and close the door behind her.


	6. Pardew Protection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The truth about Pardew Protection's real intentions of going to Isla Sorna is revealed.

Most people knew north London as the place where two very famous football clubs in England were based, Arsenal Football Club and Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. The skyline of north London, while having its fair share of skyscrapers, was very much dominated by the two stadiums which Arsenal and Tottenham called home, the Emirates Stadium and White Hart Lane, respectively. But, in recent years, a new skyscraper rose up over these two stadiums and took up a dominating place in the north London skyline, and it was put up there by a boy from north London.

Richard Seamus Pardew was born just a few doors down from the old Arsenal Stadium at Highbury and hence was a lifelong fan of the Gunners. The young Richard Pardew was also driven by a sense of both adventure and fighting for what he believed in and that was what led him to hooliganism, which was a bit endemic in English football in the 80s. After a few close shaves with the law and going through a short-term crisis with regards to the course of his life, Richard Pardew decided that perhaps it was time that he did something a little more worthwhile with his life, so he decided to join the army, specifically the Parachute Regiment. In fairness to him, Pardew did well with the “Paras,” as the British liked to call them, but after five years with the Paras, he wanted something more, and he decided to apply for selection to the elite of the elite, the Special Air Service, or SAS.

Richard Pardew served the SAS, if not with distinction then certainly as well as a trooper could. His most notable deployment was during the 1991 Gulf War, and there were of course other missions in which he participated which were still classified, “blacker than black,” so to speak. But once his wife gave birth to his first child, Richard found soldiering to now be too extreme for his tastes, and he retired from the SAS in 1992. But despite that, Richard came to believe that in the post-Cold War world, without two rival superpowers to maintain the balance of power throughout the world, regional fights between countries and peoples within the same borders would flare up and become the focus of 21st-century conflict. Six years after leaving the SAS, in 1998, Richard Pardew established the Pardew Protection Services Company alongside six fellow ex-soldiers with the aim of providing security services to VIPs such as politicians and businessmen.

With the advent of the War on Terror and Richard Pardew’s vision of a future defined by “low-intensity” conflicts restricted to within nation-states, tiny Pardew Protection Services grew and expanded, taking on more high-risk assignments in very volatile areas such as the Kashmir Mountains, the Congo, and Southeast Asia until Pardew Protection, now known by the grander and more convoluted name Pardew Consumer Services and Protection Applications, became a well-established private military company in its own right. Richard Pardew used to participate in these assignments back when his company was still a small upstart, but as Pardew Protection became involved with the big conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Pardew relegated himself into the background and let his own people handle the assignments more and more, a sign of how much he trusted them to do their jobs. He also did this so that he could be around his children more, but as recent events would prove, his presence during their growing up didn’t seem to have made much of an impact on the growth of Matt and Irene.

But even as Pardew Protection grew and expanded, Richard knew that there was a time when the battlefield would experience another paradigm shift once again, like the one that occurred with the War on Terror, when flying airliners into buildings became a legitimate weapon of choice and battlefields shifted from actual fields and plains to the streets, mosques, churches, and cities. Richard could already see the shift occurring with the rise of technological accoutrements such as drones and remotely operated vehicles on the modern battlefield. Drones could very well be the soldiers of the battlefield of the future, meaning that not a single human soldier would have to be sent into harm’s way ever again. Richard Pardew believed that technology was the wave of the future, he really did. But then a chance encounter with an old acquaintance would make him change his mind on that, if not categorically, then with a few adjustments and amendments.

Vicente Hoskins had been a soldier for nearly all of his life. When he started off as a draftee in the Vietnam War, he didn’t want to be one, to be honest, but once he had been blooded in combat in the jungles of Southeast Asia, Vic found out that he actually liked fighting and soldiering, and he stayed on in the US Army after realizing that the army would have to be shaken up and even changed from the inside out in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Hoskins watched as the Army changed from the incompetently-led force that stumbled around in the jungles and swamps of Vietnam into the technologically-assisted wonder that had overrun the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait within a matter of hours. Satisfied that he was leaving the Army better off than when he came into it, Vic Hoskins left the Army a few months after the end of the Gulf War, but not before making some friends and acquaintances, among them a young Brit trooper in the SAS named Richard Pardew.

When Hoskins and Pardew met again in 2013, both men had come a long way from the time when they first met each other. Richard Pardew was now the head and owner of his own private military company while Vic Hoskins was now the head of operations of InGen Security, the former genetics company which was now another PMC, and chief security officer of Jurassic World, the island with all the genetically-engineered dinosaurs. When they stumbled upon each other in that café in Cairo, Pardew thought that it was just a coincidence, but the benefit of hindsight had allowed him to realize that perhaps Hoskins had put quite a bit of thought into encountering him at that moment.

After catching up with each other’s lives, the subject finally turned to PMCs. “So, I see that you’ve finally got your own PMC,” Hoskins told Pardew. “Good for you, kid. I think I could have tried my hand at setting up my own PMC myself but I don’t have the patience to wait for the big bucks to finally come rolling in.”

“Yeah, Vic, that’s probably right,” Pardew said. “It’s not all good sailing, of course, and the hours are horrible, but at least the pay’s good. And how about you now, though? InGen head of ops as well as J-World security chief! How do you balance protecting and shooting people with watching over a bunch of dinosaurs?”

“It’s all good, it’s all good,” Hoskins said, nodding his head. “Although there are already rumors that InGen’s going to pull out of the Mideast markets and focus on local security stuff.”

“Does that have anything to do with the debacle over in Yemen?” There had been a well-publicized incident about a drone operated by a PMC, rumoured to be InGen, which had attacked a large wedding in the Yemeni capital Sana’a.

“In my defense, the guy getting married was known to be in contact with numerous other jihadis and ragheads,” Hoskins said, raising his hands to his chest. “He’s basically a recruiter. Someone wants to go kill a Western infidel, he hooks them up with the likes of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Anyway, I don’t believe a word of what they say. If we’re actually pulling out of the Middle East then why are we still accepting contracts from the Syrian opposition and the Iraqi government?”

“Well, I’m not surprised to hear that the Iraqis still need help dealing with their internal problems, but the Syrian opposition?” Pardew took a sip from his mug of coffee before speaking again. “What’s going to happen if the media finds out that American PMCs are helping out the Syrian rebels?”

“That’s why the media can’t know,” Hoskins said. “Apparently, in this topsy-turvy world of ours, an American PMC helping out Syrian rebels is actually going to erode the legitimacy of the rebels and add legitimacy to the righteousness of Bashar Assad’s dictatorship. Anyway, the Syrian rebels want our help with dealing with some unsavoury folks over in Raqqa. Guys who call themselves the Islamic State or something like it. The Syrians say that they’re having problems kicking those guys out of Raqqa so they want our help in doing that. But enough about me and InGen. How’s things been going for you, Rich?”

“No one’s talking about Pardew Protection, which automatically makes it a good thing,” Pardew replied. “We helped out the Malians deal with their thing over in Timbuktu and the Azawad. I think I saw some French DGSE boots on the ground there as well, but then again, that’s not surprising as Mali used to be French, right?”

“Once again, good for you, Rich,” Hoskins said. He drank from his cup and then he leaned closer to Pardew and said, “Look, Rich, there’s something I have to tell you.”

“What could that possibly be?” Pardew asked, only slightly curious.

“What’s the motto of your company again, Rich? ‘On the cutting edge of protecting you,’ right?”

“Yeah, sounds about right. What about it?”

“Well, everyone says that technology is the way forward in fighting our future battles, but I think technology’s not the true end-all be-all of modern and future warfare,” Hoskins explained. “Drones and RC vehicles and robots are all well and good for keeping our soldiers out of harm’s way, but what happens when a drone gets shot up or a robot gets blown up by an IED? They can’t go back to base by themselves so who has to get them back? Soldiers. And that’s not exactly keeping our boys out of harm’s way, is it?”

“What’s your point, Vic?” Pardew asked, this time listening intently and looking Hoskins in the eye.

Hoskins looked back at Pardew without a blink. “My point is that there is a way to fight without ever sending our boys back into harm’s way ever again. Tell me, Rich, what do you know about the velociraptor?”

Pardew snorted in mock derision, as if the question was quite insulting to him. “Who hasn’t heard of the velociraptor, Vic?” he said. “They’re the ones with the big claws on their feet, can eviscerate a grown man with one swipe?”

“The exact same ones, Rich,” Hoskins confirmed. “And don’t forget that they’re got primate-level intelligences working behind those claws.”

“That they do,” Pardew agreed. “Velociraptors are exactly the kind of creatures which make people say that some extinct creatures should remain extinct.”

“Well, velociraptors are back on this world once again, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop that.”

“Maybe. Now, Vic, what has a dinosaur got to do with the future of modern warfare?”

“Just imagine it, Rich,” Hoskins said, getting into his rhythm as he was finally talking about a subject with which he was very keen. “Imagine if you can get a pack of velociraptors to do your bidding. They’re quite an effective subject to train into following at least basic commands. Just imagine it. You go to a place, maybe a cave like the ones in Tora Bora, trying to follow an HVT or two, and you know that there’s a lot of enemies inside but you don’t want to go in and see for yourself how heavily defended that place is. So, instead of sending in your troops, you just give the raptors the scent of your targets and release them into the caves. And the good thing with raptors is that they’re very hard to injure. They’ve got thick skin and very big bones, and their vital organs are very well protected inside a big ribcage. We haven’t proven it yet, of course, but I think you can pump a whole magazine from an AK into a raptor and it will still tear you apart for fun. Then, once they’ve taken out the target and quite probably the rest of the enemies as well, all it takes to bring them back to their pens is another command or so and that’s it. Not a single body from your side will ever be in the line of fire.”

Both Pardew and Hoskins went silent as Pardew absorbed this information and Hoskins let him do so. Even as he did so, Pardew’s mind was already churning with even more possibilities: what if there was a way to combine these raptors with the technological advancements? Drones and robots were already fitted with guns and missiles; why not raptors? And why stop at sending in the raptors immediately to attack targets? Based on what Pardew had read about velociraptors, they were good ambush predators as well as natural experts at stealth. It wasn’t too big of a leap to imagine using raptors to scout out a suspected enemy base to confirm or deny if it was actually under enemy control. The possibilities, while not exactly limitless, still numbered at quite a lot.

And then Richard Pardew’s scepticism got the better of him. “Why are you telling me this, Vic?” he asked. “Simply put, we’re working for two different PMCs. InGen and Pardew Protection are basically competitors in the same market. You’ve just told me what amounts to your biggest trade secret. Why would you do that?”

“Why do we have to treat each other as competitors when we can be what we really are, as friends?” Hoskins asked back. “Look, Rich, I haven’t been completely honest with you. After the mess we—meaning InGen—left behind in Yemen, it’s been decided that it’s time to give up our assignments in the places that are always in the news like Afghanistan and Iraq and the like. That job in central Syria I told you about just a few minutes ago? That’s the last job we’re ever gonna take in the Middle East. After that, we’re settling into low-visibility jobs like providing additional security for big events or augmenting local forces in countries which ninety percent of Americans can’t find on a map. What do you think people are gonna think if after doing this, InGen announces that it’s created battle raptors? I quite like the sound of that, actually. Patent it for me, will you, Rich? Anyway, people see raptors as these scary things which shouldn’t be trusted around anyone who isn’t your mortal enemy. InGen’s supposed to be supporting and backing up police forces. What do you think people will say when a raptor tears apart some kid who decided that he wanted to make some noise outside of their cellphones? No one wants that. What people want is to see raptors tearing apart the bad guys like al-Qaeda and the Taliban. That’s why you, Pardew Protection, will introduce the battle raptors to the rest of the world. Of course, you’ll have to say that the raptors came courtesy of InGen, and questions will inevitably come up because of that particular connection, but let me worry about that.”

“Well, that’s all well and good and all but how in the world are you going to come up with the raptors?” Pardew asked. “And don’t tell me you can just whip up a batch of them because isn’t Jurassic World’s stock of animals monitored very closely to watch for possible escapes?”

“Well, since you told me not to tell you, I’m not going to tell you,” Hoskins replied with a toothy and knowing grin. “Look, Rich, don’t worry about it. I know a guy who creates dinosaurs for a living and I know a place where he can make his dinosaurs without anyone else knowing that he made them for us.”

Richard Pardew didn’t know what came over him at that moment but he accepted the deal with Hoskins without trying to know more about what the deal really entailed other than the fact that Pardew Protection would be the company to introduce the concept of using dinosaurs, specifically velociraptors, in battle. A few months after their encounter in Egypt, Hoskins had introduced Pardew to his contact within Jurassic World who could create the dinosaurs without the management of J-World knowing about it, and it turned out to be none other than Henry Wu himself, chief geneticist of Jurassic World. Wu was a firm believer of the statement that “the idle mind is the devil’s playground,” and he had been looking for opportunities to push the envelope even further with regards to creating what he referred to as “tailor-made organisms,” dinosaurs and other creatures, both living and extinct, which he could genetically manipulate to suit the desires and wishes of anyone and everyone. So far, all he had managed to create were organisms from his own imagination such as a snake with two heads and an anatomically-correct dinosaur, but he hoped to be able to one day offer this kind of service to people who wanted to own a unique designer creature. Of course, genetics was an expensive business and therefore he intended to charge highly for his services but so far, there had been no takers, which was understandable, as Wu hadn’t actually declared his desire to do so just yet. But he knew that his own talent was going to waste while Jurassic World produced dinosaurs as from an assembly line for the consumption of the public.

Then came Project Pavlov, a top-secret genetics project funded and masterminded by InGen to create a tame, domesticated, or at least trainable velociraptor. Wu’s breakthrough for this project was to insert dog genes related to domesticity into raptor embryos, but far from creating an actual tame raptor, the results of Project Pavlov succeeded only in creating an organism which was, in Wu’s own words, “a little bit more compliant and cooperative than the average raptor but in no way tamed or domesticated at all.” Nevertheless, the groundwork for raptors which were easier to work with than earlier versions had been laid down, and the seeds of an idea had been planted.

InGen Security had long wanted to be able to finally use dinosaurs in combat but after one of their drones blew up an entire wedding in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a, the Masrani Group (the conglomerate now holding the majority of the stock of InGen) had decided that it was finally time for their company to retreat from the public eye once again. All commitments made prior to this decision would still be upheld, but after that, InGen would now only accept low-visibility jobs. And since deploying raptors in low-key peacekeeping operations would be a public relations nightmare no matter which way one looked at it, Wu and Hoskins needed someone else to market their “battle raptors,” and that someone would turn out to be Richard Pardew and Pardew Protection.

That was two years ago. Hoskins and Wu had kept Pardew updated on the progress and growth of the six raptors which would be turned over to Pardew Protection once they had reached a sufficient level of training and maturity and, in those two years, it had seemed like a particularly smart piece of business, and Richard Pardew felt happy with himself for having accepted the deal as it was. And then the Second Isla Nublar Incident happened.

Only a day had passed since the beginning of the incident but the speed and spread of social media had allowed Richard Pardew to gather and know a few things about what happened during the Second Nublar Incident. It started when another Jurassic World genetic experiment, dubbed the _Indominus rex_ , escaped from its enclosure and wreaked havoc with the rest of J-World’s animals as well as evading J-World and InGen retrieval teams sent to first bring it back in and then put it down when it was apparent that a live _Indominus_ was not worth the risk. There was also grainy footage of a battle happening between the _Indominus_ , a _Tyrannosaurus_ , and a pack of _Velociraptors_ , although the battle ended with the _Mosasaurus_ killing the _Indominus_ by swallowing it whole. Even though it actually happened, Richard Pardew felt that the _Mosasaurus_ killing the _Indominus_ was kind of anticlimactic, almost a real-life deus ex machina.

But the Second Nublar Incident was actually at the root of Richard Pardew’s current problems. The _Indominus_ ’ rampage had killed a lot of Jurassic World’s animals. Luckily for J-World, they had another entire island dedicated solely to replenishing their stock in the event of something like Nublar Two. Unluckily for Pardew, Wu, and Hoskins, that island was Isla Sorna, “Site B,” the place where Hoskins had told Pardew that Wu could create his dinosaurs without someone looking over his shoulder.

It was close to midnight over in Jurassic World, quite possibly right in the middle of the battle between the _T. rex_ and the _I. rex_ when Wu had made a call to Pardew from an InGen helicopter. “Richard, have you heard the news?” Wu had asked without preamble.

“If you’re talking about the debacle currently happening on your little island, Henry, then yes, I’ve not only heard the news, I’ve seen them,” Pardew replied. “I’d say that’s bad news for you.”

“This is no laughing matter, Richard, so don’t treat it as lightly as you’re doing now!” Wu had said in an uncharacteristically angry tone. “This isn’t just my problem now, you know; it’s your problem as well now!”

That had immediately wiped the grin on Pardew’s face. “What do you mean by that, Henry?” he asked, more seriously this time.

“That _Indominus rex_ killed a lot of our animals in Jurassic World and now the park has to replenish the stock from Isla Sorna,” Wu replied. “That’s where our raptors are, in case you’ve forgotten. Let me tell you something about Site B, Richard. It’s not there just as a place where idle geneticists like me can fiddle around creating orgs to our hearts’ desires. Site B exists mainly as a place where Jurassic World can keep a reserve stock of animals to replenish the stock on Nublar in case of a large-scale casualty event like the _Indominus_ ’ escaping and killing a lot of our animals off. So far, I’ve managed to fudge up the records and hide our raptors from the eyes of the accountants, but once they put boots on the ground in Sorna then they’re going to find out about those raptors and they’re going to find out about our little Operation Genesis thing.”

“Why exactly are you telling me this, Henry?” Pardew asked. “It doesn’t sound like you’re just trying to keep me up to date.”

“I want you, no, I need you to get your raptors, our raptors, off of Sorna before the J-World people arrive to round up their own animals,” Wu told Pardew. “You may think that six extra raptors isn’t going to make that much of a difference in the final count, but for me and for these people, six raptors more than had been accounted for means that there will be hell for me to pay when they confront me about it.”

“Why are you talking as if you’re facing this alone? What happened to Hoskins?”

“Some of his people told me that Vic was last seen inside the Visitor Center just before raptors got into the place. We have to assume that he’s dead. That leaves only you and me to face the wrath of Jurassic World when they get wind of our battle raptors.”

The good news was that Pardew Protection already had two teams in place in Costa Rica to help train and augment the local police for their coming elections so it was just a matter of ordering his teams down to Isla Sorna to round up the raptors before the J-World people arrived (by sheer dumb luck, the ship accompanying the Pardew Protection teams was the _Jewel of Esfahan_ , the only vessel in Pardew Protection’s lists which was equipped with the special pens that Vic Hoskins had designed for the specific purpose of holding and transporting velociraptors). The bad news was that Richard Pardew had just found out that his children, Matt and Irene, had apparently taken one of the family’s private jets and gone on some sort of joyride and now they had crashed the plane right on Isla Sorna. Richard Pardew wouldn’t call what was happening karma just yet, but he had to admit that his bad luck was beginning to pile up ever since a genetically-created hybrid organism escaped its holding pen on an island thousands of miles away from north London.

Richard Pardew was right now standing in his office on the top floor of the Pardew Building, the skyscraper which was the new headquarters of Pardew Consumer Services and Protection Applications Limited. He looked at his watch and calculated that it was probably dusk or even probably sundown now over at Isla Sorna. Pardew walked over to his desk, pulled out a drawer and took from it a satellite phone made secure with Pardew Protection’s own encryption technology. He punched in a number and waited for the connection to come through. “Katsouranis,” the person at the other end said as he answered the call.

“Giannis, Richard,” Pardew said by way of introduction. “How goes the retrieval operations?”

“Um, ah, well, Richard, uh,” Giannis Katsouranis stuttered, “we’ve, uh… we’ve hit a few roadblocks and made a few stumbles.”

“Care to explain about that? Did you get the raptor expert that Henry recommended, that Owen Grady guy?”

“That’s just the tip of the iceberg of our stumbles, boss,” Katsouranis replied. “We got Grady, all right, but we were forced to pick up his friend as well. You know, Dearing, the general manager of J-World?”

“Why would you do that, Gian? I thought my orders were clear: grab Grady no matter what. Why did you have to get Dearing as well?”

“See, boss, that’s the thing. Grady and Dearing were together when we came to pick Grady up, so we had to take Dearing along for the ride. Dearing would have said something about Grady going with us if we left her behind so we had to take her as well.”

“All right, Gian, fine. As long as none of them speak about this whole thing… That’s a bridge we’ll cross when we get to it. How about the retrievals themselves? How did they go?”

“Not very well, either. We sort of had to trick Grady into coming with us by opening with the crash of your kids’ jet. I had the feeling that neither Grady nor Dearing were really keen to go to Sorna but we had to do it. And that didn’t end well for any of us. While we were examining the crash site, we got jumped by packs of dinosaurs. You know, the ones that spit venom, what were they called? _Dilophosaurus_ or something like it. And then there were these huge raptors, giant raptors, I think Grady called them _Gigantoraptor_ or something like it as well. We lost six people there, Richard, and Dick Hamada’s mortally wounded. Borthwick and Adamson patched him up as well as they could but Dick’s still fifty-fifty at best. No one has any room to be optimistic here, sir. And we also lost track of Grady and Dearing.”

“Goddamn it. All right, then, what about my children? Did you find any signs of them?”

“Grady did say that he thinks at least one or both of them may have gotten away from the crash site but we were unable to go any further because that was when we were attacked,” the Greek replied.

Pardew let out a long and deep sigh as he rubbed his face with his right hand. He then turned back to his phone and asked, “What about our raptors, Gian? Surely we’ve made progress with that.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you once again, Richard,” Katsouranis said, “but as it’s already sundown here on Sorna, I’ve decided not to risk my teams and I’ve called them back to the _Jewel_. I hope you’ll understand why I made this call, sir.”

“No, no, Giannis, I understand completely,” Pardew assured his chief of operations. He then sighed again as he pinched the bridge of his nose and then ran a hand through his mane of snow-white hair. “This has seriously messed up the plan, Gian,” Pardew finally said after a few moments. “This was never supposed to happen like this. All we were supposed to do was to get our raptors off of that island before the Jurassic World people came and counted their stocks. What we were supposed to do was to get Owen Grady there and calm down our raptors enough so that we can finally catch them and get them out of there. But what happened is that we were also forced to take along Claire bloody Dearing, the chief operations officer of Jurassic World just because she was with Grady when we came to talk him into doing this job for us and she would certainly make some noise about what he’s supposed to do and why we took him. And add to that the fact that my own children—my own children, Giannis!—has decided to pick this very day to finally screw up their father’s work, and now we’re having to divert resources from the retrieval to get back Irene and Matthew safe and sound. Bloody hell! Is Henry there with you? Let me talk to him.”

Over on the _Jewel of Esfahan_ just off the coast of Sorna, Giannis Katsouranis handed over his satellite phone to Henry Wu. “He wants to talk to you,” Katsouranis said by way of explanation. Wu took the phone and said, “Yes, Richard, what is it?”

“I’m not going to ask you about the non-venomous _Dilophosaurus_ and the gigantic raptors,” Pardew said. “I know that you wouldn’t be able to tell me about them even if you wanted to, so, Henry, just tell me this: how much longer do we have before Jurassic World finally arrives there to round up their dinosaurs?”

“I don’t know, really,” Wu replied. “We might still have a window of between 24 to 72 hours but J-World’s people could already be on their way here from San Jose as we speak. I know that you don’t want to risk your people by trying to retrieve the raptors at night but remember that time is always of the essence here, Richard. You got that?”

“Yes, yes, I got it,” Pardew said a little impatiently, nodding his head furiously even as he knew that Wu couldn’t see him. “Now give the phone back to Gian, please,” he said. Wu immediately obliged. “Nothing has changed, Gian,” Pardew told his Greek head of operations. “Our primary focus is still the retrieval of our raptors from that island, but make sure that you set aside people and assets to look for Grady and his girlfriend Dearing. Not only do we need them to get our raptors to calm down but someone will also notice that the Raptor Whisperer and the GM of Jurassic World are missing. And we don’t need that kind of attention on us at all.”

“Yes, boss,” Katsouranis said. “Anything else, sir?”

“That is all,” Pardew said, and then he ended the connection.


	7. Warehouse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Owen and Claire find some shelter to spend the night in but they get an unexpected (and unwanted) visitor.

There was a lot of dirt and debris on the floor, but what appeared to be a clear path carved out by what was most likely a small group of people, maybe three or four, stretched out in front of Owen and Claire as they took in the interior of this mysterious warehouse. “Well, someone’s been here recently,” Claire said out loud.

“I’d say it has to be survivors from the crash,” Owen continued as he knelt down to examine the trail. “And there must be more than just one or two of them; probably three or four.”

They went further down the hallway, a bland gray concrete affair that ended on a flight of metal stairs that went up. They had originally been painted green but was now showing signs of the rusting metal underneath the flaking paint. Their steps echoed with a hollow ring as they went up the stairs before finally arriving at a metal platform overlooking the rest of the interior space of the warehouse, which was mostly occupied by three massive cisterns. “What on earth are those things?” Owen asked.

“I don’t know,” Claire replied, “but they look very like the holding tanks for the fish that we feed to the mosasaurus.”

They continued up to the second floor, which was basically a network of catwalks that gave them a better view of what was actually inside the big cisterns. Claire gasped when she saw what was inside the cisterns. “They’re sawfish,” she exclaimed. “Very, very big sawfish. They must be intended for some kind of niche market, most probably in Asia.”

“Yeah, I think you can add the European market to that,” Owen said. “I can see some French, German, Spanish, and Russian warnings on the tanks alongside Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. And I think someone else is already taking advantage of all the free food.” He pointed at a large pile of both clean and half-rotten bones near one of the cisterns, which also had a pair of mysterious indentations at the top. “Best not think about what made those marks,” he said.

“But why in the world are we keeping these massive sawfish in these tanks in the first place?” Claire asked as she and Owen went back down to the first floor. “They’re not going to be put on display in Jurassic World. And, the last time I looked, these sawfish aren’t the ones we feed to the mosasaur, although if the park does go back into service, we really should think about getting these fish for the mosasaur. They would be probably way cheaper than the great white sharks for the feeding shows, and that might finally get the WWF off of our backs…”

Some sort of eerie greenish-golden glow emanated from the bottom of the cisterns, casting the shadows of the massive sawfish into murky relief on the warehouse’s metallic roof. These shadows followed Claire and Owen all the way back to the first floor, which contained a row of offices and rooms which all appeared to do with the running and maintenance of this warehouse. Looking into one of the rooms, Owen found something that confirmed his initial suspicions about this place. “Will you look at this,” he said as he also let out a whistle of appreciation while examining the computer that he found inside one of the offices. “Flat-screen monitor; top of the line CPU for office applications; nice, nice, nice,” he muttered. “This particular model came out in 2013, so this warehouse, or facility, or whatever this place is, must have been constructed up to at least that time.”

“How do you even know the years that computer models come out on?” Claire asked, genuinely curious despite herself or their current situation.

“Let’s just say that back in my SEAL days, there were times when we needed to know what kind of computers the bad guys used to store their data and plans and plots so that we could break into them quickly or, if we really had to, rip them right out of their sockets without damaging them,” Owen replied.

They went out of the first office and checked on some of the other rooms, which were more offices and basically copies of the first office they had entered. This was to make sure that they didn’t have any unwanted neighbors with them, neighbors of the dinosaur kind. There were some droppings inside some of the offices but they appeared dry, brittle, and crumbling into dust, meaning that they had been there for quite some time already before Claire and Owen’s arrival. However, it was at the very first room in the first floor of the warehouse that both of them found concrete evidence that someone had been here before them recently. This room was apparently the warehouse’s communications center, if the big radio right in the middle of one of the walls wasn’t proof enough. But that wasn’t all that attracted their attention. There were at least four gaps in the fallen foliage scattered throughout the room, gaps shaped like a rectangle and could just fit a person inside. There was also other man-made trash such as energy bar wrappings, two empty plastic water bottles, a bundle of torn, dirty, and bloodied clothes, and some loose strips of medical gauze. “Looks like this was where the survivors patched themselves up after the crash,” Owen said out loud.

“Makes sense,” Claire agreed. “I mean, they’ve got a radio right here with them. And if they needed to get away quickly, the stairs are just right out the door. But now that begs the question: if they were here before and actually stayed for some time here then where are they now?”

“I don’t know,” Owen replied honestly. “Maybe the big predator that feeds on the sawfish in here scared them away.”

“And I suppose you’ve got a plan in mind for when the same thing happens to us, right?” Claire asked.

“Sure,” Owen shrugged. “Although we shouldn’t attract too much attention given that the predator only probably makes a pit stop here for some quick fish food. Then again, I really hope it doesn’t pick up on my eau de diesel or your dino crap perfume.”

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I already took the time to wash off as much of the shit away as I could when we were back in the mainland,” Claire replied. She then realized what Owen was implying and she turned around to him and asked, “Are you telling me that you haven’t taken so much as a single shower the whole time that we’ve been in Costa Rica before we got dragged over here by these Pardew PMC guys?”

“In my defense, I was busy being debriefed by the State Department and the Costa Rican police.”

“Ugh. You men can be so disgusting sometimes!” But Claire merely shook her head and folded her arms in front of her and didn’t push the subject further so Owen chose to ignore it. He knelt down in front of the radio and began examining it for signs of damage or missing parts. “Looks like it hasn’t been roughed up too much,” he said. “There’s no vital parts missing apart from the transmitters themselves, which whoever built this place either took with them when they bugged out or stashed somewhere around here.”

“Can you fix it?”

“If I can find the transmitters, sure,” Owen replied. “It’s just a matter of hooking them back up to the radio. But I’m not going to do that in this kind of lighting. I might hook up the transmitters to the wrong thing like the battery or the power source and then, boom! No more transmitter. No more power source. No more radio.”

“Just like that?” Claire asked disbelievingly. “’Click, boom!’?”

“Basically, yeah, just like that, click, boom!” Owen said after a moment’s thought. He then happened to look at his watch, and he muttered, “Oh, crap.”

“Why? What is it?” Claire asked him.

“It’s already seven in the evening,” he replied. “If memory serves me right, this is the time when some of the smaller nocturnal predatory dinosaurs like raptors and other dromaeosaurs like to go hunting. At least we found a good place to spend the night and get some rest. Why don’t you go sleep first, Claire? I’ll keep watch over the both of us.”

“And where exactly am I supposed to sleep here?” she challenged.

“Um, over there, I think? I’m sure you’ll figure something out. You are a clever girl, after all.” Claire shook her head in resignation and began looking around the room for a spot to lie down. She found a sleeping bag balled up and seemingly abandoned in a hurry in the far corner of the room. As it was highly improbable that the original builders of this warehouse would have any need for a sleeping bag in their radio room, Claire was sure that the sleeping bag had come from one of the survivors of the plane crash that had brought her and Owen here to Sorna in the first place. There was some blood on the sleeping bag but it was drying up and turning brown so she didn’t mind it as much as she would have had it been fresh. She slid herself into the sleeping bag and closed her eyes.

It seemed to Claire as if she had just fallen asleep when she found herself opening her eyes once again. The moon was bright and full and casting its light down on the jungle of Isla Sorna and into the radio room where she and Owen were spending the night, hopefully away from the predatory dinosaurs living on the island. And speaking of Owen, Claire saw that he was gone from his place near the door, and for a moment she thought that the bastard had left her behind, and then she saw that Owen was actually sound asleep beside the door, on his haunches, with his rifle on his lap and his mouth slightly open. But as there was nothing that she could see that could have possibly woke her up, Claire shook her head and settled back down into the sleeping bag.

And then something shook her awake once again, and this time she was sure that she was being literally shaken. It wasn’t just Claire, either; the whole place was shaking. Claire’s first thoughts was that this was an earthquake—Islas Nublar and Sorna were volcanic islands formed from a hotspot just like the Hawaiian Islands, after all—but the shaking wasn’t happening all at once. In fact, it appeared as if the tremors were getting stronger the more time passed. Then Claire realized what exactly it was that was causing the ground to shake more and more, and she sat bolt upright on the sleeping bag upon making the realization, and then she rushed for the radio room’s sliding steel door.

As Claire ran for the door, she happened to bump into Owen, who grunted in his sleep before he opened his eyes as well. He saw that Claire was trying to close the sliding door, thought about letting Claire do all the work, and then he noticed that the ground was shaking in a short and rhythmic way with each tremor increasing in magnitude, then he stood up to help Claire close the door. The two of them struggled with the door as it was made of armored or reinforced steel and the rails on which it moved was rusty and hadn’t been oiled for some time, but they both eventually managed to force the door closed. As Owen moved the bolt to lock and secure the door, Claire reached up for the eye-level viewing panel to slide it shut, but then she caught sight of what had been causing the tremors, and she gasped. Owen looked up through the same panel to see what had surprised Claire so much, and when he saw what it was, he couldn’t help but softly blurt out, “Oh, my God.”

The dinosaur inside the warehouse was unlike any other animal both of them had ever seen. It had a long and slender snout not unlike that of a crocodile or a gharial; two big, muscular forearms; a massive red sail on its back with green spots and splashes; and a pair of huge and powerful hind legs. One of the creature’s eyes was visible from their vantage point, and they were grateful for it deep down as that single eye manifested pure evil and malevolence. The eye was a bright green, something between neon green and acid green. The iris in the middle was thin and slit like a cat’s, which only added to the creature’s fear and creepy factor.

It was _Spinosaurus aegypticus_.

The spinosaur looked around the warehouse, and it stopped when it noticed that one of the doors on the first floor was now closed. Claire and Owen immediately ducked down from the eyehole and flattened themselves against the door. They could hear the dinosaur’s slow, deep, and rhythmic breathing, and clouds of mist from its snout flew into the room through the eyehole. At that moment, Owen knew that what he had told Claire was wrong; he was sure that the spinosaur could smell both of them inside the room even though it couldn’t see them at the moment.

A low, deep growl rumbled out of the spinosaur’s throat and Claire could only imagine that evil green eye looking around, trying to see the prey that it could smell was inside this now-closed room. Then, after what felt like an eternity but was probably only just one minute or two at the most, the two humans felt the spinosaur move away from the door. None of them dared move from their hiding place though as they feared that the dinosaur might be lulling them into a false sense of security in the hopes of revealing themselves. Owen finally made the first move, standing up behind the door and keeping his face flat against the rusting steel. He then angled his face so that only a thin sliver of it could be seen from outside the door, a trick that he had learned during his SEAL days so that his head wouldn’t get shot off by a nervous insurgent. This time, though, Owen wasn’t afraid of getting his head shot off; rather, he was more worried about his head or any other part of his body really, getting bitten off. Oh, and he also hoped that he wouldn’t see a green cat-like eye on the other side when he peeked out of the door.

Luckily for Owen, there was no green eye waiting for him at the other side. The spinosaur had finally moved away from the door to the radio room and was now fishing around in one of the sawfish cisterns inside the warehouse. When Claire saw that Owen hadn’t jerked back his head almost immediately after looking through the eyehole, she also got up and chanced a look through the hole.

The spinosaur was fishing at the cistern with the two strange depressions on its top. Its head was hovering above the water, its snout submerged. Suddenly, the head jerked forward, and then it raised its head to reveal one of the huge sawfish caught in its teeth. The sawfish thrashed around and tried to strike at the spinosaur with its jagged rostrum but the spinosaur tossed the sawfish onto the ground and swiped at its back with its huge forelimbs, leaving huge gaping gashes in the flesh. The sawfish, which had been flopping around when it was dropped to the ground, grew very still, allowing the spinosaur to finally tear into its latest kill. The spinosaur dug into the sawfish’s flesh, stripping off big chunks and tossing its head back to swallow the meat.

The spinosaur suddenly stopped eating and looked around the place as it sensed that it was being observed. It laid its eyes on the closed room where it could smell prey, but once it saw nothing of interest, or at least nothing that it would consider prey worth wasting effort and energy on, it turned back to the sawfish it had caught and began stripping off more chunks of flesh from it. Meanwhile, unseen by the spinosaur, two pairs of human eyes watched silently as the dinosaur ate its kill.


	8. Radio

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Owen manages to make contact with Katsouranis and his men but yet again, the rescue mission is disrupted by dinosaurs.

Claire didn’t think that it was possible, but she had somehow managed to fall asleep after that episode involving the Spinosaurus appearing inside the warehouse where she and Owen had taken refuge for the night. It had only been a day since the two of them had been dragged over here by the guys from that PMC called Pardew Protection, supposedly to help them recover a group of people that had crashed on Isla Sorna, but Claire had a hard time believing that all that had happened just a day ago. It felt like a million years had passed since that day and today, which was a clear and bright morning with the sun shining down on them through the window where the moon had shone down on them last night. When Claire woke up, she found that she had fallen asleep in a sitting position, with her back resting on the cold steel door that had been the only thing between them and the spinosaur. Claire stretched her arms and legs, stood up gingerly, and then worked the kinks out of her spine as best as she could.

Having done that, Claire began looking around the radio room, which looked much more expansive in the daylight. Aside from the radio, over which Owen was now bending, there were large and empty shelves in the room that must have contained all manner of files and documents back when the facility was still in use. Claire began looking through the shelves, more for want of something to do than actually searching for something, and then suddenly her hands touched something she hadn’t been expecting. She took the thing from the shelf and saw that it was a photograph, an honest-to-goodness photograph developed from film and printed on photo paper. It showed a man and a woman standing beside some kind of small plane, like a Cessna or something like it. The man looked to be in his late forties or early fifties, and he had a square face, a pointed chin, a high forehead and a head of thick black hair. The woman, meanwhile, was in her thirties, but she looked to be edging closer to forty than thirty. She had a thin and bony face framed by startling orange hair, and her lips were thin as well. If she squinted, Claire could almost believe that the woman looked just like her.

Claire turned the photograph over to see if there was anything written on the back. There was, but it wasn’t much, not that she had been expecting anything anyway. Written on the back of the photograph was **V.E. & M.D.**, and at that moment Claire realized she knew exactly who the woman in the photo was. It was her aunt, Victoria Everett, and the photo must have been taken sometime during the final days of Site B. But that didn’t add up, though. Site B was evacuated back in the early 1990s, and back then Aunt Vicky would have been 27 or 28, not 36 as she appeared in the picture. And while Claire didn’t know who the man, whose initials must be M.D. as written on the picture, she did have the feeling that he was or should have been familiar to her. Claire folded up the photo and put in her pocket. She may not have known her Aunt Vicky that well but she still remembered liking her, and Claire also wanted to bring back some proof that she had been here in Sorna as well.

Claire walked back to Owen, who was busy working on the radio. He was holding what looked like a circuit board or a motherboard in one hand and some kind of connector or adapter in another. Another board was clenched between his teeth. “Do you really think you can fix that thing?” Claire asked him. Owen’s initial reply was garbled and undecipherable as he had spoken with the board between his teeth. He attached the board in his hand to the connector, which allowed him to take the board in his mouth. “I found the transmitters on that shelf just above the radio,” he said more clearly. “They were a bit dusty, but they weren’t damaged, and that’s the important thing. Now the only thing I have to do is hook them back up properly so we can finally call some help over to us.”

“Why do I have this feeling that you want to get off of this island just as much as I do?” Claire asked.

“Claire, you know how there are a lot of things here in Sorna that shouldn’t be here at all,” Owen replied. “The old InGen used Site B as their personal sandbox, and they made a lot of stuff here that shouldn’t have been made in the first place. The new InGen and Masrani are doing much the same thing right here and right now, and I haven’t even gotten to the part about the gigantoraptors and the vanilla dilophosaurs. There’s something big and fishy going on here in Sorna, and I for one don’t intend to be here when it inevitably blows up in everyone’s faces.”

“What about the crash survivors? Are you going to give them up for dead?”

“No, of course not. But this was never just about them. This Pardew guy is involved up to his neck with whatever’s happening here. I’m sure of it. And I’m willing to bet my house that Wu and Hoskins are in on it too.”

Owen hooked up the second board to the connector and then he backed away from the radio as he turned on the power. There were a few sparks, followed by a low humming noise, and then the dials flickered to life. Owen laughed as he spread his arms theatrically. “It lives!” he said in the tone of a mad scientist in a classic black-and-white movie. Then in a more serious tone, he said, “Now we just need the frequency to contact Katsouranis and the _Esfahan_. Claire, remember before we had to run to the forest because of the territorial fight. Dick Hamada said something about a contact frequency. Do you remember anything that he said? I sure don’t because I was shell-shocked to hell right after that.”

“Shit,” Claire muttered. “I can’t remember squat. Everything was happening so fast, and things were confusing as hell, but…. Wait. Hamada said something about numbers. He wouldn’t stop repeating those numbers, like his mouth had gone on autopilot and it was saying the last thing he had said over and over again.”

“Can you remember what those numbers were?”

“Hang on, I’m trying to remember. Okay, I think I got it. Hamada said ‘One-thirty-one-point-oh’. Yeah, that’s what he said. One-thirty-one-point-oh.”

“One-thirty-one-point-oh,” Owen repeated. “Are you sure about that? Because a radio frequency is just like a telephone number; you have to get it exactly right or else you’ll end up calling the wrong number…”

“I know how a frequency works, Grady,” Claire replied hotly. “But yeah, I’m sure of it. One-thirty-one-point-oh.”

“Okay, here goes nothing,” Owen said as he tuned the radio to the frequency that Claire had told him, 131.0 kilohertz. Owen then reached for the microphone connected to the radio and pushed the transmit button. ”To anyone listening on this frequency,” he began, “this is Owen Grady on Isla Sorna. Can anyone hear me? Is anyone out there?” There was a burst of static from the radio’s speakers, although Owen couldn’t tell if it was because of somebody contacting them or if it was just interference from ions in the atmosphere or sunspots. It was almost always ions or sunspots.

Then, slowly but surely, the static began resolving itself into a noise that could be recognized as a human voice. “Grady? Grady!” it called out. “This is Katsouranis.”

“Oh, Katsouranis, thank God!” both Owen and Claire muttered in relief. “Yeah, this is Grady,” Owen replied.

“Where are you?” Katsouranis asked. “Is Dearing with you?”

“Yes, I’m here,” Claire replied, speaking on the radio for the first time.

“Well, thank God for that,” Giannis Katsouranis muttered. “Now listen, where on the island are you? We’ve been looking for the both of you through the night.”

“Really?” Claire asked, more to Owen than anyone else.

“Nah, probably not,” Owen replied. “They wouldn’t be too stupid as to send out patrols into the forest at night. But hey, it’s the thought that counts, right?” Then, over the radio, he said to Katsouranis, “We’re in a warehouse half a click from the crash site. We found a radio in here and managed to make it work. That’s how we were able to talk to you now.”

“Okay, we’re familiar with the place,” Katsouranis replied. “We’re sending a chopper over there to pick you up. Just stay put and don’t go anywhere.”

“Copy that,” Owen said, and then he turned off the radio. “They better be ready with a lot of answers because I have a lot of questions for them,” he muttered.

However, barely had Claire and Owen stepped out of the radio room when they both felt the now-familiar impact tremors of a large creature approaching the warehouse. “Not again,” Claire muttered, but in more of an exasperated than a scared tone.

“Must be breakfast time for the big guy,” Owen said. “Come on, let’s go out through the back door.” The two moved down the catwalk and down another flight of stairs leading to the ground floor. There was another door, an emergency exit, on the far side of the warehouse, near the rearmost cistern. Owen pushed on the crash bar to open the door, and he was about to step back into the forest outside the warehouse when he saw another animal standing right in the middle of the path leading out of the emergency exit.

It was a _Dilophosaurus_ , and this time it was the kind with the frills and the spitting venom.

“Front door! Front door!” Owen yelled to Claire, and he yanked the emergency exit closed just as the dilophosaur extended its frill and let out its shrill cry, and Owen heard the venomous spit smack hard on the other side of the door. The two of them then ran back the way they had just come from, and just as they got back onto the catwalk, they found themselves face to face with the _Spinosaurus_. Claire screamed, but Owen ignored this and he raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired off a single shot at the massive dinosaur. The bullet hit the bony left eye socket of the spinosaur, and it let out a mighty roar as it reeled back from the impact even it was the equivalent of firing a BB or airsoft gun at an actual tank, but it did the job that Owen wanted it to do. “Don’t stop! Just move!” he yelled out, and he had to actually push Claire forward to make her go running again, and the two of them slipped past the confused dinosaur.

Together, Claire and Owen forced open the massive steel door that served as the employees’ entrance into the warehouse, the same door that they had entered just last night. As they ran outside, they could see the massive muscular tail of the spinosaur sticking out of the warehouse, and then they went running down the game trail as fast as their legs could carry them. Behind them, the spinosaur bellowed once again, and the ground began to shake as it pulled its head out of the warehouse and began to follow the two tiny prey that it had smelled the night before. Above them, a Huey helicopter bearing the logo and name of Pardew Protection Services flew above the game trail, momentarily grabbing the attention of the spinosaur. The dinosaur roared at this new airborne intruder before finally returning to the chase of its tiny prey on the ground, but the helicopter had given Owen and Claire some good separation from the spinosaur that they wouldn’t get caught by it almost immediately.

The two of them burst out onto the clearing where the Pardew jet had crashed and where a pack of unmodified dilophosaurs were now walking around. “Dinosaurs, dinosaurs everywhere!” Claire shouted in exasperation, and Owen led the two of them down the edge of the forest before running to the west. The unmodified dilos made to give chase to these new animals that had entered their territory but then the spinosaurus entered the clearing, and the dilos were now more than preoccupied with defending their territory from the massive new intruder predator and they all but forgot the two humans who were running ever farther away from them.

Owen and Claire ended up on the rocky shores of a small river, which was really more of a stream than anything else, and they ran down what initially appeared to be a sunken path in the middle of the river to make it to the other side of the river, where the Pardew chopper was now waiting for them. The Huey circled the place one more time before setting itself down on the shores of the river. “Come on!” the chopper’s crew chief called out to them. “No time to waste!”

Claire was just about to step aboard the chopper when she suddenly shouted, “Look out!” The crew chief turned around to look behind him, and the helicopter pilots turned their heads to their left. “What the hell is that thing!?” the pilot shouted as he saw what had made Claire shout.

What they had originally thought as just a sunken path in the shallow river had revealed itself to actually be the back of a massive crocodilian creature. The animal was easily twenty feet long, and its jaws were wide open, revealing rows of sharp and conical teeth, all ready to bite down on the hovering Huey. The pilots’ reaction to the creature’s sudden appearance was quick, but not quick enough. Even as the pilots tried to take the Huey up and away from the creature’s maw, the crocodilian’s jaws slammed down on one of the chopper’s landing skids, and this combined with the upward lift being provided by the helicopter’s main rotor to tilt the chopper and almost send the crew chief plummeting to the ground. The crew chief managed to grab onto one of the canvas seats mounted inside the Huey with his left hand, and with his right hand he drew his pistol from its holster and emptied a clip at the crocodilian’s head. The bullets, while they were powerful .45 ACP rounds, bounced off of the creature’s sloping skull with little if any damage inflicted.

The crocodilian tugged at the helicopter, and the Huey lurched at this tug-of-war between the crocodilian and the lift being provided by its main rotor. Something would eventually have to give though, and just as the chopper crew were thinking that it was their Huey’s skid that would give way to all the pressure first, the crocodilian released the skid from its jaws, and the chopper lurched as it zoomed up into the air, leaving the crew chief hanging on for dear life at the edge of the door. “Base, this is Flappy Bird,” the pilot said on the radio. “The LZ is hot. Exfil is a bust.”

“Copy that, Flappy,” Giannis Katsouranis replied back onboard the _Jewel of Esfahan_. “Get the guests to the backup LZ, and this time make sure that it’s fucking clear of fucking dinosaurs!”

“Yes, sir—”

“Incoming!” the co-pilot yelled out. Another dinosaur, this time the same spinosaurus that had been chasing Grady and Dearing before the Pardew helicopter finally arrived at the destination, had appeared at the riverbanks. It reared its head and made to grab the noisy, smelly and annoying flying thing that had been distracting it from its prey since earlier in the morning. The pilot turned the Huey away to avoid the spinosaur’s maw but the dinosaur still managed to brush at the chopper with its snout. The forced pitched the chopper over, and the crew chief, who had just managed to pull himself back into the helicopter, was thrown off-balance by the impact, and he fell screaming out of the open sides of the chopper, just barely hanging on to one of the landing skids and seemingly avoiding plummeting to his death. But it wasn’t to be the end of his suffering just yet.

As the Huey bobbed and weaved in between the spinosaur and the crocodilian, which had begun fighting as they both recognized each other as competitors for prey, the crew chief’s tenuous grip on the landing skid began to slowly slip away, and then with a final pained cry, his hand slipped away and he fell to the ground. But before he felt his body and bones being crushed by the impact with the ground, something sharp and narrow snatched at him in mid-air, and he found himself in the jaws of the _Spinosaurus_.

The _Spinosaurus_ was preparing to deliver the killing blow to its newly caught prey when it felt a sharp pain on its left forearm. The spinosaur looked down, its prey still in its jaws, and it saw that the crocodilian had lunged up and grabbed hold of its forearm with its jaws. The crocodilian had somehow managed to jump half of the height of the spinosaur to reach and bite down on the latter’s forearm. The spinosaur tried to shake off the crocodilian, and the crew chief, still in the spino’s jaws, got shaken around too.

The spinosaur then realized that it was fighting a losing battle against the crocodilian with its prey in its jaws so it practically spat out the now-limp body of the crew chief back into the river. With its mouth now free, the spinosaur bent down to bite at one of the crocodilian’s limbs, and soon both creatures were locked in a tug-of-war with their own limbs. At first, it looked as if things were locked in a dead heat. Then the _Spinosaurus_ began clawing at the crocodilian’s flanks with its free arm, and as soon as the spino felt the croc release its grip on the spino’s arm, the spino also released the croc’s leg. The crocodilian crashed onto the rocky shores of the river with an almighty crunch of bones and armor plating. Before the crocodilian could upright itself, the spinosaur dugs its arm claws into the crocodilian’s short but vulnerable neck, and with a great roar, the _Spinosaurus_ carved out deep trenches in the flesh of the crocodilian’s neck. The crocodilian flopped dead on the shore of the river, and the _Spinosaurus_ unleashed a mighty, vicious, primeval and victorious roar over its vanquished challenger.

The Pardew Protection helicopter had managed to fly away from the battle between the spinosaur and the crocodilian where they had gotten almost the best seat in the house for the fight. But even as both pilots were trying to comprehend what had just happened, Giannis Katsouranis called out to them on the radio and said, “Flappy Bird, status report.”

“Base, this is Flappy Bird,” the pilot replied. “Alonso’s dead, sir.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Katsouranis muttered back on the _Esfahan_. Then, on the radio again, he asked, “What about Grady and Dearing? Do you have them?”

“Negative, sir,” the pilot replied. “We were attacked by the spinosaurus and a massive crocodile-like creature and after that, they were just gone, sir.”

“Gone? What do you mean, they’re gone?”

“I mean that they’re gone, sir. We can’t see them on the ground, and we’re not picking them up on infrared as well. They must have bugged out when the dinosaurs were fighting below us.”

“Oh, this just keeps getting better and better,” Katsouranis muttered to himself. Then to the Huey, he said, “All right, Flappy Bird. Return to Base to refuel and then rejoin the main force ASAP.”

“Sir, what about Alonso? We can’t just leave him here, sir.”

“What? I thought he was dead.”

“He is, sir, but the dinosaurs didn’t eat him. He got tossed around like a rag doll by the spinosaur while it was fighting the huge crocodile thing.”

“Fine, then. Retrieve Alonso’s body if you think you can, but make sure that you two don’t get eaten because of him. After that, return to Base to refuel and then join up with the rest of the main force when you can.”

“Roger that, sir.” As Katsouranis leaned back on the radio in the communications room of the _Esfahan_ , he wondered how many more lives would be lost in the effort to preserve the secret of Pardew Protection Services on this godforsaken island. “We never should have agreed to do this in the first place,” he said to himself. “This was a fool’s bargain, and we knew it. Henry Wu knew it. Vic Hoskins knew it. Richard Pardew knew it. And we still went ahead and did it anyway. Now it’s going to blow up in our faces, and we can’t do anything about that.”


	9. Realization

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Owen has a theory about his and Claire's presence on Sorna that may be closer to the truth than he thought.

They ran and ran for as long as they could until they could run no more. The first time that the two of them had stopped moving was when Claire finally leaned on the trunk of a tree just to keep herself up. Owen rested himself against another tree beside the one where Claire had stopped, and as he began to wipe the sweat off of his face, he said, “Ten minutes. That’s all the time that we can rest before we have to get moving again. Any longer than that and we’ll be sitting ducks.”

“That’s all right,” Claire said through her panting. “Ten minutes. That’s fine. I’m okay with that.” She inhaled and exhaled deeply, a yoga technique that she had learned to calm down her heart and mind, but this time the technique wasn’t working as well as she would have wanted it to. Her mind was still replaying all of the events that had happened to her from being chased by that _Spinosaurus_ to almost getting swallowed up by a huge crocodilian that was as big as a small river. Owen had urged Claire to run as soon as the crocodilian had made to attack the helicopter from Pardew Protection, but they were still both nearby when the spinosaur had arrived at the scene and snatched at the chopper’s crew chief from the air. Claire could recall clearly how the _Spinosaurus_ had shaken the poor fellow around before throwing away the body like a dog would an old chew toy. That was what humans were to these huge dinosaurs, after all; toys and kibble and little else. That particular realization made Claire shiver.

Claire tried to focus on the here and now so her mind wouldn’t keep repeating over and over again the events in her head. She was still alive, and that was the most important thing. Her legs hurt, which was quite understandable considering that she had just run God knows how many miles just to get away from those dinosaurs. There was a place on her backside that throbbed dully to the beat of her pulse; that was the place where she had landed roughly after Owen had pulled her back when the crocodilian revealed itself to attack the Huey.

Claire then looked down at her feet, which were aching from all the running that she had done. Her shoes were caked in mud, and she made to scrape it off on the bark of the tree where she had been leaning just a few minutes ago but to little avail. She finally grabbed a handful of leaves and used those to wipe away the mud. Finally, after some effort, she managed to get most of the mud off of her shoes. Claire knew that there was no real reason for her to be this concerned about the state of her footwear, especially at a time when she knew that her life was in constant danger at every possible second. But she just couldn’t help it. The pair of light purple, almost lilac, stilettos on her feet were by no means the most expensive pair of shoes in her wardrobe; they were actually just cheap knockoffs of a globally recognized brand. But they were the first pair of heels that Claire had bought on her first ever paycheck, and she had come to see them as her lucky pair of shoes. Claire had been wearing this particular pair when she had finally received her diploma of graduation from Stanford; when she had been first accepted into Masrani Global; and when she had been finally promoted to operations manager of Jurassic World just a few months or so ago, actually. God, was it all just a few months ago? It all felt more like 65 million years ago. Yesterday certainly felt that long ago in the past.

Claire had also slipped into her lucky heels for the unveiling of the _Indominus rex_ to the J-World investors, hoping to pass on her good luck in the heels to the rest of the park. But that hadn’t quite worked out as she had liked. The _Indominus_ escaped, and the Second Isla Nublar Incident soon followed. Even then, despite all of the talk about restocking the park with animals from Sorna, there was also talk that Jurassic World had outstayed its welcome and it was time to abandon both the park and its assets, the dinosaurs, to the wild. At least the heels were still lucky for Claire herself. They had helped her outrun a _T. rex_ , and now it had also helped her outrun both a _Spinosaurus_ and a massive crocodilian creature, although the Huey providing a distraction to the spinosaur also helped her and Owen’s case against the spino. So the heels were pretty much still lucky for her. But she would have definitely grabbed her hiking boots had she known she was going to go on this unexpected adventure through Site B, the secret side of both Jurassic Park and Jurassic World.

“Hey, are you just about ready yet?” Owen asked Claire suddenly, breaking her out of her mental reverie.

“Why? What’s going on?” Claire asked back.

“We need to get going. We’ve got company coming up on our tails.”

Claire was about to say something snappy when she heard the frighteningly familiar barking roar of a velociraptor in the distance, and she realized that now was not the time to delay. “Okay, let’s go,” she said, and the two of them set off deeper into the forest. But after a few more minutes of walking, she finally couldn’t contain the thoughts running around in her head anymore. “What the hell is going on on this island!” she said. “I don’t know what it is about this place but there is something very, very wrong with Sorna. And I don’t mean just that secret shit with Pardew and Katsouranis and his boys; I’m also talking about those vanilla dilophosaurs and feathered gigantoraptors and the big crocodile thing in the river! Not to mention that huge frigging _Spinosaurus_ and how it looks like it’s going to follow us to the ends of the earth just to eat us. What the hell is going on here!?”

“Shit, Dearing, I don’t know, too,” Owen replied. “But I know what you’re talking about. Nobody I’ve met who has ever been to Sorna at least once has never failed to tell me that they can all sense that something is off with this island. Heck, that feeling doesn’t leave you even after you’ve left Site B. You know the history of this place, right?”

“Only the basics,” Claire admitted. “I know that the old InGen used Sorna for their industrial-scale production of Jurassic Park’s assets until Hurricane Clarissa finally forced them off the island. And aside from their regular production, their scientists have admitted to doing their own R&D and proof of concept stuff here. Henry Wu, Lori Ruso, Mike Backes, Nam Tsing, Laura Sorkin, they all did it. I’m sure at least one of them is responsible for those non-venomous dilophosaurs or those gigantic raptors or even that giant crocodile thing in the river. What was it called again? _Sarchosuchus_ or _Deinosuchus_ or whatever it is.”

“I’d say it was probably _Deinosuchus_ ,” Owen replied. “The size fits, plus the fact that it really looks like a huge-ass crocodile makes me think that it really could be _Deinosuchus_. I mean, did you see how big it was? We practically walked right on top of it! You have to wonder how something like that could get so big on an island of this size, and why someone would think that it would be good to bring it back to life today.”

“Yeah. Can you imagine what would happen if that thing found itself in the Cretaceous Cruise?” Claire added. “The lawsuits! The bad publicity! The OSHA reports!”

“The dead people,” Owen muttered under his breath.

“The dead people!” Claire repeated. “Look, my point is that InGen just cloned and cloned without thinking about how they were possibly going to take care of those creatures once they realized they can’t integrate them into the park? Okay, sure, we messed up on the _Indominus_ as well, but at least we studied what it was that would bring people back to the park.”

“Yeah, sure, you planned it out first, and then you just threw together a bunch of different animals to see how they would all come together. That’s definitely a better plan than cloning species one by one,” Owen said with more than just a hint of bitter sarcasm.

As they plunged deeper into the forest, Claire turned around to ask Owen, “Do you even know where we’re going?”

“Well, not specifically,” Owen replied. “But I do know that we’re still in carnivore country, or at the very least the edges of it. I’ve never been to this forest before physically but I do know that this forest is almost smack dab in the middle of the island. To our south is the new J-World facility built by Masrani to do the very same thing that InGen did here before. And while we don’t have a ready explanation for being here looking like this, I’d rather get fired than get eaten. I’m sure you feel the same way.”

“Of course I do,” Claire said. “How about those people from Pardew, though? I know you don’t trust them but they did come back for us.”

“Yeah, they did. But I’m not going back to that riverbank or even the crash site. That crash site is currently right in the middle of a turf war between those vanilla dilos and the _Gigantoraptors_ , and riverbanks are prime hunting spots for ambush predators like the _Deinosuchus_. Not that that guy’s going to do any hunting anytime soon after the spino practically gouged its throat out.”

“And how about the survivors? What are we going to do with them?”

“Well, we won’t be any use to them in some dinosaur’s stomach, right?”

“Of course.”

“Still, there’s at least one positive that we can get out of this whole thing,” Owen said as he bent down before a cluster of shrubs and bushes.

“And what could that possibly be?” Claire challenged.

“I found us some lunch.” Owen held up a bunch of berries that he had plucked from the shrubs. “It’s not much,” he admitted, “but at the very least we won’t starve too much while we make our way down to the Masrani facility.”

“I see,” Claire said. “So this going south plan is still a thing.” She then heard her stomach rumbling, and she realized that she had not eaten a thing for over half a day ever since that Greek man from Pardew, Katsouranis, dragged them away from that cantina in San Jose. “Fine. Give me some of those berries. I’m famished. I assume that they’re edible because you wouldn’t pick them if they were inedible or poisonous, right?”

“Yeah, sure, right,” Owen nodded.

They continued walking deeper into the forest, taking short ten-minute breaks for every hour that they had been walking. Occasionally, an animal would roar somewhere in the distance but Owen would always assure Claire that the animals were far enough away from them to not cause any real trouble. And then, as noon arrived over the island and rays of sunlight shone down through the canopy, Owen and Claire heard something snuffling and snorting in front of them. The bushes and shrubs in front of them also began to rustle and shake. Owen instinctively raised his rifle to his shoulder while Claire moved behind him and to his right, her hands on his shoulder and right arm. The shrubs rustled some more. Owen’s finger crept closer and closer to the trigger, and he also felt Claire’s fingers beginning to squeeze his biceps. The shrubs rustled even more, and then a small dinosaur with large hind legs and a long tail hopped out in front of them. The dinosaur let out a high-pitched whoop with wide round brown eyes.

“It’s a hypsy,” Owen finally managed to say with a short high-pitched laugh of his own, and he immediately lowered his gun. _Hypsilophodon_ was a herbivorous dinosaur and posed little threat to them if they just minded their own business. “It’s a juvenile!” Claire cried out as she stepped out from behind Owen, and she approached the juvenile hypsy. “Hey there, baby girl,” she cooed as she reached out to pet the hypsy. The young hypsilophodon rocked her head back and forth and emitted a soft whistle as it closed its eyes, seemingly enjoying the sensation of Claire petting her and caressing her head. More whooping and honking cries called out in the forest, and both of them looked up to see the rest of the hypsilophodon herd eating the low vegetation in the forest. And just like that, the fear and nervousness that had enveloped the two of them during the morning were immediately replaced by awe and sheer astonishment and amazement.

The juvenile hypsy whooped and began bobbing her head back and forth, seemingly reaching up for one of the pockets on Owen’s vest. “I think she wants some of your berries,” Claire said to him. “Oh,” he muttered as he dug around in his vest for some berries. He took out a bunch of small round red and green berries and handed them to Claire. “I think she likes you more,” he said in explanation.

Claire shrugged as she took the berries and held them out in front of her, in clear view of the juvenile. “You want some of these berries, baby girl?” she asked softly. The hypsy nibbled at some of the berries first, and then once she had grown accustomed to the taste, she grabbed a mouthful of berries with her beak-like snout. “Good girl,” Claire said as she scratched the young hypsy’s neck while the dinosaur chewed her food.

Beside them, Owen sighed as he stared out at the scene in front of him, of the hypsilophodon herd grazing through the forest, and he nodded his head at the peace, tranquility and majesty of it all. _Maybe this island isn’t always so bad of a place after all_ , he thought to himself.

And of course, as if right on cue, a velociraptor bark echoed through the trees. Owen and Claire turned to look behind them but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Meanwhile, the herd of hypsilophodons looked up from their grazing as well. The juvenile that Claire had just fed chittered loudly in seeming alarm, and a larger hypsy that had to be the juvenile’s mother responded with a mournful bellow of her own. “That sounded like that was nearby,” Claire said in a low whisper in response to the raptor’s barking. “Shouldn’t we be running already?”

“No, not just yet,” Owen replied. “They always sound so loud when they’re still miles away. It’s when the barking gets softer that you should get really worried.”

The herd of _Hypsilophodons_ let out a collective long low groan, and then they all scampered away from the scene. The juvenile hypsy whooped and ran for her mother, who whooped in reply and then picked her up with her beak and ran away as well. At the same moment, the barking of the velociraptors grew softer and softer until it was barely audible. “Just like that,” Owen said in continuation of his previous statement. “All right, no time to waste! No time to run! We’re dead meat if we run!”

“What do we do? Where do we go?” Claire asked.

Owen looked around, and then he saw the massive trunk of a large and sturdy tree with huge branches. “Up the tree! No time to waste! Go, go, go!” Both Owen and Claire grabbed hold of the nearest sturdy branches within their grasp and began climbing up the tree. It soon got to the point that both of them were grabbing branches and vines like automatons in their hurry to get as high up the tree as they could. Owen finally found a pair of branches stout and strong enough to support them. “Over here, Claire!” he called out, and he helped her up one branch. Then it was Claire’s turn to help Owen heave himself over the other branch once she was safe and secure on her branch. Owen slid onto the branch just as the first velociraptor arrived at the scene.

The raptor stopped right at the foot of the tree that they had just climbed up, and it seemed to be breathing rapidly from running. Owen got a good look at the raptor, which was covered almost entirely in white down or proto-feathers, and it had a yellow frill of feathers on its heads. That, combined with the dull black sheen of its scaly snout, gave this particular raptor the appearance of a very large cockatoo. A large man-eating cockatoo.

The raptor barked to its packmates and ran off in the direction of the hypsy herd, and it was soon followed by another raptor, and then yet another raptor, and finally three raptors in close proximity to each other. Owen didn’t get too much of a good glimpse on these next raptors, but he saw enough to see that they were also covered in proto-feathers and that those feathers were colored red, blue, green, and yellow. The other raptors that had just run past them looked much like parrots and macaws. Parrots and macaws that could and would kill a man if given the opportunity, that is. The raptors screeched as they continued to chase the hypsilophodons.

“I think I now know why I’ve been brought back to this island,” Owen said as he stared at the receding forms of the velociraptors.


	10. Raptor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Henry Wu and Pardew Protection attempt to retrieve the raptors that they bred on Site B.

“Connecting to satellite,” the man on the black-and-white-faced tablet computer muttered. “Synchronizing clocks… Establishing primary telemetry… Coordinating with GPS… Downloading tracking protocol feed… We’re in, Doc. We’re live,” he said as he passed the tablet to Henry Wu.

“Thank you, Willy,” Wu said as he accepted the tablet. He, the technician and Giannis Katsouranis were aboard the same UH-1 helicopter from Pardew Protection Services that had come very close to picking up Owen Grady and Claire Dearing just a few hours ago before the _Spinosaurus_ and that massive _Deinosuchus_ had interrupted that. Wu and Katsouranis were seated on the row of seats in the Huey facing forward while the technician was on the seats facing backwards, towards the rear of the chopper. Their chopper was accompanied by another Huey fully loaded with Pardew contractors and two CH-46 Sea Knights each carrying a pair of light but sturdy-looking rectangular cages underneath their bellies. These helicopters were being escorted by a Robinson R44 and a McDonnell Douglas MD 500 Defender helicopter. After the delay in the actual retrieval operation to pick up Grady and Dearing (which had ended not as well as they would have wanted, chiefly with both Jurassic World personnel still lost somewhere on the island and knowing about the Pardew operation), it had become imperative for the contractors to retrieve the assets that Wu had helped create for Richard Pardew and Vic Hoskins’ joint venture. The problem of tracking down the assets had been compounded by the fact that they hadn’t been able to connect to the satellites in charge of tracking the assets until today, when the ions in the atmosphere being charged and excited by the sunspots had finally cleared up.

“I’ve always wondered how you were able to track the assets,” Katsouranis said to Wu as the latter began manipulating the displays on the tablet. “I thought they were notoriously finicky about trackers being put in their bodies.

“I mean, you’re not wrong, Giannis,” Wu replied. “Back in InGen, we had lots of problems keeping track of our velociraptors. The old park warden, Muldoon, wanted to have the raptors in Jurassic Park fitted with radio collars, and the raptors promptly chewed off the collars. The next time that we cloned raptors, we used transdermal implants in their hind legs, and they quickly clawed the trackers out as well. So for this batch, we decided to inject the trackers into the cardiac muscle. One of the raptors, when they finally matured, tried to claw out the tracker in its heart, and it bled out before it had even gotten past its ribs. The others learned from that and they stopped trying to get at their trackers as well. They know that they got the trackers in their bodies but they don’t try to get the trackers out anymore.”

“Where are they now?” Katsouranis asked.

Wu tapped in the necessary commands on the tablet to bring up the display that Katsouranis wanted to see. Six red pulsating dots appeared on a map of the central plain of Isla Sorna. “The main pack is over to our right, our three o’clock,” Wu said. “Judging by their speed, I’d say that they’re chasing something at the moment.”

“Hunting, maybe?” Katsouranis offered.

“Well, in that case, let’s hope they make a successful kill so they won’t be too hungry or too angry when Francis finally has to talk to them.”

“Speaking of which….” Katsouranis switched frequencies on his headset so he could communicate with the other helicopters and he said, “Katsouranis to Jefferson.”

“Right here, guv’na,” replied a male voice with a thick Cockney accent.

“Did you get all that?”

“Loud and clear, guv.”

“Stand by for the all clear, Francis. We need to get this done before Masrani’s people comes here to restock their island park. Bring our girls back, Francis.”

“Righty-o, love.”

“Wait, did I hear that right?” Wu asked. “Did he really just call you love?”

“Well, what can you expect?” Katsouranis replied. “He’s Cockney.”

“Commander, this is Angry Bird 2,” the pilot of the Defender called out. “I have eyes on the assets.”

“Roger that, I see ‘em,” Francis replied from the other Huey.

“Where are they?” Wu asked. He was switching between looking at the dots on the tablet and looking out the side of the Huey towards the ground.”

“‘Ave a butcher’s at your three o’clock, Doctor,” Francis replied. Wu turned to his right, and he finally saw five familiar birdlike shapes chasing after another bipedal dinosaur. Wu could see one white raptor, two green ones, one red and one blue raptor chasing the other dinosaur, which looked to Wu like a herbivorous dinosaur, a _Hypsilophodon_ to be exact.

Henry Wu would never admit it to anybody, but this particular batch of _Velociraptor_ that he had created for Pardew Protection was, for him, his greatest ever achievement. One of his greatest frustrations as a geneticist was the fact that he couldn’t make his dinosaurs grow feathers. In the past, that hadn’t been too much of a concern for him as nobody knew that dinosaurs (or at least certain species of dinosaurs) grew feathers or at least the evolutionary precursors to feathers. But science marched on with the new perspective of feathered dinosaurs, but Wu’s genetic creations had not. It took Wu hundreds of hours of research and physical genetic manipulation to determine that it was some sort of null allele that simply refused to activate despite Wu’s best efforts.

Wu knew that this had something to do with his own technique of mixing and matching DNA from extant creatures to fill in the gaps in the dinosaur DNA strands. So for these raptors that Hoskins had intended to sell to his friend Richard Pardew, Wu chose to source DNA from the velociraptor’s closest living relatives the birds. Macaw, parrot and cockatoo DNA, to be exact, with a touch of emu, ostrich and cassowary DNA as well. And finally, wonder of all wonders, the feather gene in these raptors finally activated, and he even had the added bonus of bearing the colorful plumage of their descendants.

This was the first time that Wu was getting to see his feathered raptors since they had hatched. He remembered that he had managed to create a brood of twelve eggs, but he wasn’t surprised to see only five raptors on the ground. Stillbirths and high infant mortality rates were still a thing for geneticists like him despite over three decades of progress and maturation of their technology.

The raptors screeched as they jumped onto their prey, a young _Hypsilophodon_ that looked like it had recently just reached maturity. The red raptor landed on the hypsy first and its sharp sickle claws cut deep into the hypsy’s belly. White intestines tinged with red blood spilled out of the herbivore’s belly and the rest of the pack pounced on the fallen animal and began tearing off strips of meat and innards from the downed but still breathing hypsy. “Yes, yes, that’s it,” Wu muttered as he watched the raptors eat their kill. “Eat your fill now so you won’t want to eat our guys.”

“Set us down on that clearing over there, at the assets’ six o’clock,” Katsouranis ordered. The pilots of the Huey carrying him, Wu and the technician circled around the clearing indicated by Katsouranis before lightly setting the bird down on the grass. The other Huey also followed them down to the ground while the Robinson, the Defender and the two Sea Knights began orbiting the clearing. The contractors onboard the second Huey disembarked and then formed a classic protective cordon around the chopper.

Last to come out of the second Huey was Francis Jefferson, the Cockney to whom Katsouranis had been talking while both choppers were still in the air. Strictly speaking, Jefferson was employed by InGen, but he had come highly recommended out of Pardew Protection Services. Jefferson’s background was mostly with the British Army, training and handling bomb-sniffing dogs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Francis Jefferson’s job for today was essentially the same that Owen Grady did back in Jurassic World, training and handling raptors (at least as much as raptors could be handled and trained).

“How’s the Yank Grady?” Jefferson asked Katsouranis as the latter approached the former.

“We found him and his girlfriend back in the boss’s kids’ plane crash site but the spinosaur scared them away,” Katsouranis replied. “Look, Francis, don’t take it personally. Grady is just the backup plan; you’re the one who’s been around the assets for as long as they’ve been alive.”

“Don’t worry about it, guv’na,” Jefferson said. “Trust me, you’re not gonna need Grady for this. I got this in the bag. I’m taking the girls home with me.” He then took out a yellow-and-black taser pistol from his left thigh holster. “And if the girls get a little bit too frisky, well, they’re gonna get tased, bro. Whether they want to or not,” he said, brandishing the taser around. He then turned to the rest of the Pardew contractors and said, “All right, you wankers, let’s go get ourselves some raptors, yeah? Cover my arse, arseholes! And get the cages prepped and ready. No need to take more time than necessary to get them out of here.”

“Aye, sir,” one of the contractors called out, and they fanned out into a semicircle around and behind Jefferson as they began to approach the raptors’ kill site. Meanwhile, the two Sea Knights with the cages dangling from their bellies set down their cargo near to the rest of the contractors who hadn’t gone with Jefferson towards the raptors.

“What’s up, bitches, how’s it hanging?” Jefferson muttered to himself as he approached the snarling raptors and their kill site. He kept his hands up level with his shoulders and walked slowly to show that he posed no threat whatsoever to the raptors or their latest meal, but nevertheless, his right hand still held on to the taser lightly but firmly, ready to deploy it at any aggressive move towards him by the raptors. “I’m moving in closer,” he said on the radio as he saw that the raptors had not yet noticed him moving towards them, so busy were they in eating their down hypsy prey. “Everyone else stay back but keep an eye on me and on them.”

Francis Jefferson then stepped on a dead and brittle branch, and the white-feathered velociraptor, the one Jefferson had referred to as “the cockatoo” because of its resemblance to the aforementioned bird, looked up from the carcass of the hypsy and towards the source of the noise. Jefferson stood firm and brazenly in the open, not even bothering to hide himself from view. The white raptor stepped away from the rest of its siblings and began walking towards Jefferson. The crest of yellow feathers on the top of its head spread out like a Mohawk and the dinosaur snarled.

“Hello, love,” Jefferson said loudly and in an easygoing voice. “You remember me, don’t you? Remember old Frannie boy? I got some good news and some bad news for you, love. The bad news is that you and your sisters aren’t supposed to be on this island at all, and neither am I and my friends. But the good news is that Frannie boy here is gonna get you girls out of here before those guys from Masrani’s Jurassic Park come over and see that you girls most certainly definitely don’t belong here.”

The white raptor looked at Jefferson curiously. Its bloody jaws opened and closed as the raptor first cast one eye and then another towards the strange but somehow familiar creature standing in front of it. The creature seemed oddly familiar in the back of the raptor’s mind, but it couldn’t tell just how it knew the creature just yet. The raptor barked and raised its crest yet again.

“Yeah, love, that’s right,” Jefferson continued, still speaking in that calm and easy Cockney voice. “Tell your sisters that it’s time for all of you to get out of here. This island ain’t no place for a clever girl like you to be in. Come on, then. Let’s bring all of you home.”

The white raptor’s continued barking had attracted the attention of its siblings, a number of which lifted their heads up from the carcass and looked at Jefferson as well. A raptor with mainly green feathers with blue and yellow highlights ran up to the white’s side and hissed at Jefferson. The white raptor snapped at the green one with its jaws before it chittered and then both raptors turned to stare at Jefferson once again.

“Now I’m really getting to the both of you, aren’t I?” Jefferson said. “All right, love, now what I want you to do is to get the rest of your sisters to stop eating and get in the cages over there. You see ‘em?” He pointed at the reinforced steel cages painted in matte black in the back of the clearing with some of the contractors standing around them. “Don’t worry about it, pet; soon all of you will be home safe.” At that moment the R44 and the MD 500 helicopters flew right over Jefferson and the two raptors, which served to agitate the two raptors, and their agitation also passed down to their siblings, who began shrieking and barking at the helicopters even as the noisy flying things went away. And because the raptors were agitated, the humans became agitated, restless and worried as well.

“Whoa, take it easy right there, girls,” Jefferson said. “No need to get all hot and bothered over nothing now. Just take it easy. Keep it real. Sit back and relax.”

But if anything, this only served to grate the raptors even more, and the green raptor roared and began moving towards Jefferson. Yet the Brit didn’t make to run away. He stood his ground against the onrushing raptor and brought down the taser in his hand. “Whoa! Hold it right there, love,” he said. Incredibly, the green raptor stopped right in its tracks and turned its head at the yellow object in the strange creature’s hands.

“You remember this, don’t you, love?” Jefferson said. “Remember what this thing does when it touches you, yeah? That’s right, love; I have the power of ten thousand volts of electricity with me. That’s right, love. Just calm down and no one has to get hurt, yeah?”

The green raptor purred as it turned its head to look at Jefferson yet again. The white raptor barked, bared its teeth and arched its back, but it didn’t take a step towards Jefferson. It looked as if Jefferson had the situation well and under control.

“Hey, weren’t there six blips on that thing just a while ago?” Giannis Katsouranis asked in genuine curiosity. Henry Wu looked down at the tablet computer and saw that there were now indeed just five blips left on the screen. Two of the blips corresponded to the two raptors staring it down with Jefferson and his taser. Three more blips matched up with the three raptors still beside the carcass of their kill. At first, he couldn’t find the sixth and final blip, and the thought that this sixth raptor had somehow managed to remove the tracking tag in its heart briefly crossed his mind before the signal for the sixth blip appeared once again, but this time the blip was now somewhere to Jefferson’s right. A dim and nearly forgotten lecture about the intelligence capacity of the velociraptor and its ability to set traps for its prey from none other than Alan Grant, delivered as always in his Canadian tuxedo, immediately popped to the forefront of Wu’s mind and he yelled out, “Oh, shit, it’s a trick!” To Katsouranis, he said, “Tell your boys to get the hell out of there!”

“Why? What’s going on!?” Katsouranis demanded. But even as he was still speaking, the sixth raptor with the stunning red plumage of a scarlet macaw jumped out of the trees and bushes to the right of Francis Jefferson and landed right on top of him. Jefferson had tried to turn around and face this new threat from the bushes but he was just a second too slow, and he was not able to bring the taser to bear and activate it right at the red raptor’s face before the red raptor had already pinned him to the ground. “Bastards! Motherfuckers!” Jefferson yelled out. The white raptor screeched and the other raptors (excluding the red one) ran for the Pardew contractors, who had already split and were themselves running for the safety of their helicopters. The Hueys’ pilots had lifted off of the ground while some of the contractors were still on the ground, and they were forced to grab for the landing slats and hang on for dear life and hope to hell that the raptors didn’t jump after them.

“Come on, Giannis! Let’s get out of here now!” Wu shouted, the fear he felt creeping into his voice as he managed to drag and manhandle the physically bigger Katsouranis back to their Huey. “Get us out of here pronto!” the geneticist demanded to the pilot, who didn’t need to be told twice. Their Huey seemed to be particularly reluctant to get off the ground but eventually it was able to claw its way up into the air. The two Hueys carrying the contractors followed the lead Huey away from the clearing, surrounded by the Robinson, the Defender, and the two Sea Knights. The last that Giannis Katsouranis saw of the hapless Francis Jefferson was the red raptor sinking its sickle-shaped foot claw into Jefferson’s belly and slashing it open, and the Cockney’s rapid-fire cursing turned into one long high-pitched scream that was quickly and suddenly silenced.


	11. Reasons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Claire and Owen finally manage to have a heart-to-heart talk while waiting for daylight to arrive.

Night had fallen over Isla Sorna. What was supposed to be just a quick job trying to locate a bunch of crash survivors had turned into one and now two days of staying away from the dinosaurs roaming the island. The hard thing for both Owen and Claire to accept though was that they were not supposed to be in this forest at this point. They should have been picked up by the Pardew Protection contractors earlier in the day but that had been interrupted by first the _Spinosaurus_ and then the _Deinosuchus_ , the massive crocodilian creature lurking in that stream that was as wide as the _Deinosuchus_ was long. The appearance of the spino had forced them into the forest near the geographic center of Sorna, where the both of them had been forced to take shelter in the trees due to the appearance of a new kind of velociraptor, the kind with feathers as documented in the fossil record.

The barking of the raptors had gone on nearby throughout the day so, as a precaution, Owen had said that they should stay in the trees for the rest of the day until the raptors had finally gone away. Before nightfall though, Owen did risk a quick jaunt back down on the ground to collect some more berries for them to eat during the night but they had gone through those berries quickly and both of their bellies were rumbling in hunger once again, almost loud enough to be heard by any predator with sharp ears. To keep their minds off of their situation, both of them had taken to talking about anything and everything that came to their minds. At the moment, the topic had turned to their respective times in college, specifically their athletic careers.

“I used to play football for Purdue,” Owen said as he leaned back on the tree trunk. “I played either tight end or running back, but I was just second-string at best. I got some good numbers when I was playing, though. There was actually a point in my career in which five yards a carry was a bad game for me. But then during a game against Northwestern, I made a head-on tackle and got a slipped disc. It took me a few months to recover, during which I got into basketball a little bit. And then, just when I had finally recovered from the slipped disc, I went and banged up my MCL. That’s when I realized that maybe sports isn’t exactly for me. All right, Dearing, now it’s your turn.”

“Wait, you slipped a disc and _then_ you tore your MCL?” Claire repeated because she simply couldn’t believe that Owen could have gone through that much and still be like he was right now. “How did that feel like? And how come it doesn’t look like it’s affected you even the slightest?”

“I never said I tore my MCL, Claire,” Owen said. “I just said I banged it up. It was more like a strain than anything real damaging. I just don’t limp because I’ve taught myself to ignore the pain. Now come on now; don’t be shy. You said you played soccer over in Stanford, right?”

“Yeah, I did,” Claire replied. “I was a goalkeeper. People think being a goalkeeper, whether in soccer or hockey or lacrosse, is a simple thing in which you just stop the ball or the puck going into the net. But it’s not that simple. When the team wins, nobody mentions the goalkeeper except for maybe one or two saves that they made that stopped the other team from scoring the tying goal or the winning goal. But when the team loses, it’s almost always the fault of the goalkeeper. They didn’t react quickly enough to the ball, or they got wrong-footed completely. Some reporters would be a bit kinder to the goalies and put some of the blame on the defenders or the midfielders but goalies are still a bit maligned as opposed to the other positions. But I liked standing between the sticks, and the fact that I don’t have the stamina to keep running around and around for ninety minutes also helped me choose my position.”

“Any good memories about playing?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Claire shrugged. “Okay, maybe there was this one thing. We were in the quarterfinals, and it had gone all the way to a penalty shootout. Our star striker had missed her penalty and the other team looked like they wouldn’t be missing any penalties anytime soon. So it was up to me to make a save, a stop. Their third penalty kicker stepped up, and I knew that I had to make a save right then and there if we were to stand a chance of making it through. When the referee blew her whistle, I just closed my eyes, went by instinct and jumped right.”

“Did you save it?” Owen asked her. “The penalty, I mean.”

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t even know about it until after the guys in the stands cheered,” Claire admitted. “I didn’t even feel the ball touch my gloves. I just saw it rolling away from me and out of play. So that was a big boost of confidence for all of us. The next kicker from our team smashed in her penalty and then once again it was my turn to make another save. This time I didn’t close my eyes. I went to the right once again, and this time I didn’t just parry the ball away. I caught it right in my hands and I remember I actually stood up and lifted the ball over my head like it was the trophy already. And we did make it through, 4-2 on penalties.”

“Did you win it? Did you go all the way and win the final?”

“Well, not really,” Claire said with a short and slightly bitter laugh. “Our coach had this policy of rotating goalkeepers so I didn’t play in the semis. Instead, this 300-pound girl from Australia gets the nod as goalkeeper for the semifinal. Don’t get me wrong; she’s actually quite a very good goalkeeper. She actually kept the other team scoreless for ninety minutes. Unfortunately, they kept us out the whole game as well so we had to go to extra time. And the other team just bypassed our midfield and managed to catch her off of her line twice. We lost 2-0, and that was it for us. The only good thing we got out of it in the end was that the team that beat us lost in the final, so you could say that we got the last laugh in the end.”

There was nothing actually funny about Claire’s last statement, but somehow Owen found himself chuckling, and eventually Claire joined in as well even though she had no idea why or what Owen was laughing about. Maybe it was because both of them had been fearing for their lives ever since they had been separated from the contractors by the warring packs of _Dilophosaurus_ and _Gigantoraptor_. But both of them hadn’t been able to relax for a long time and this had been the only time that they had been able to let off some steam and not think about all of the dinosaurs that could be hunting them down and eating them. Eventually though, both Owen and Claire did stop laughing and they both fell into an uneasy and awkward silence.

Not surprisingly, it was Claire who broke the silence first. “Oh, Owen, what the hell happened to us?” she asked with a deep sigh.

This got Owen to stop picking the leaves off of the branch that he had snapped off from above his head. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

“I mean, what happened to the two of us?” Claire repeated. “I mean, we were together for, what, six or seven months? And then suddenly, nothing. We split up, just like that.” She snapped her fingers for effect.

Owen sighed deeply as well. He had honestly been wondering himself about what it was that happened to the two of them that had brought their relationship to a sudden and complete halt. He thought about it all the time, but he would think about it more in his off days, when he wasn’t busy training the raptor squad and he had the freedom of the day to do what he wanted. “Oh, I’d say that it was probably reality that happened to us,” he finally said.

“‘Reality happened to us’?” Claire repeated. “What do you mean by that?” she asked, genuinely curious.

“I mean, just look at the facts, Claire,” Owen continued. “You’re a career woman and I’m a dinosaur jockey. I like being around man-sized killing machines while you’d rather avoid being around animals as much as possible. You love managing, organizing and running stuff while I just prefer to let life happen as it likes and deal with the rest later. We’re just two completely different and clashing personalities. We got nothing in common.”

“Hey, that’s not true,” Claire said. “Remember the first that we talked to each other that wasn’t about business? I caught you watching some cheap and cheesy monster movie with shitty graphics and even more terrible acting. It was about something crazy as well, like _Megashark versus Crocosaurus_. It’s the one with Urkel, right?”

“Oh, yeah, now I remember,” Owen said, grinning at the thought. “Who would have thought that Claire Nikita Dearing, Chief Operations Officer of Jurassic World, is into shitty monster movies?” In fact, it had been their shared love for laughing at the sheer crappiness and absurdity of the vast majority of monster movies that had started their relationship in the first place.

“But seriously,” Claire said, “once you forget about treating those movies like an actual movie and just sit back and watch how the crappy CGI monsters or dinosaurs stomp, chomp and mutilate the extras and the expendable supporting characters with their horrible acting skills, everything becomes much more enjoyable and fun.”

“Oh, and speaking of movies, didn’t you say something about how I looked like one of your movie crushes?”

“Oh, yeah,” Claire said, her cheeks flushing red in embarrassment even though Owen couldn’t see her from his branch. “Come on, you gotta admit that you look like the guy from _Guardians of the Galaxy_. What was his name again? Star King? And the actor, he was Chris Pine, right? Or was it Chris Hemsworth?”

“It’s Chris _Pratt_ , Claire,” Owen said. “And his character’s name is Star- _Lord_ , not Star-King. At least I know the name of the girl you look like, and she’s Ron Howard’s daughter.”

“What!?” Claire then scoffed as only Claire Dearing could scoff. “Oh, please! I do _not_ look like Bryce Dallas Howard! I saw her in _Spiderman 3_ , the one with Tobey Maguire, and she doesn’t look like me. Then I saw her again in _The Twilight Saga: Eclipse_ , and the only things we have in common are the hair and the skin. But she and I don’t look alike. Never have and never will.”

“Well, you do have very pasty skin and hair the color of carrots or even an EasyJet plane,” Owen added. “You know me. I like me some gingers.”

“Yeah, and I wanted a rough-and-tumble soldier guy so I could get away from all the other corporate types,” Claire said. “And your type was a girl who could handle herself just about anywhere. We both just wanted some fun. So here we are.”

“You know what?” Owen interjected. “I just realized something. We were friends with benefits, Claire. Fuckbuddies, even. But we were serious fuckbuddies, you know what I mean? We were both just after some fun, really, but then when things began getting a little too serious, we both just panicked and ran away.”

“Oh, please, Grady,” Claire scoffed again. “Don’t say that I did things I never did. I didn’t run away from you; I actually tried to get closer. You’re the one who ran away when things got serious. Admit it, Grady. You were afraid to commit. You were afraid to give yourself over so totally and completely to somebody else like I did to you. You’re probably afraid of the fact that you actually love me as well.”

“Look, Dearing, you wanna know the truth?” Owen asked in reply. “Yeah, I was afraid. I was afraid to love you because I didn’t want to make you a widow this early in your life. Heck I didn’t even want to think about what could happen to make you a widow. I mean, look at me, Dearing. I’m an ex-SEAL who’s spent the last two years of his adult life trying to control the most dangerous creature known to man. If something happens to me at work, you’ll be lucky if you get enough pieces of me to bury. My grave would most likely not be in a cemetery but in a pile of velociraptor shit. And when I was still with the SEALs, I saw things happen to my buddies that would make a raptor attack a more palatable end. If we’re lucky, we could bring back our dead buddy’s body to be given a proper burial back home by their family. Otherwise all the family’s gonna get is an empty coffin, a folded flag, a 21-gun salute and another SEAL adding the dead guy to the list of SEALs KIA. I didn’t want to make you through that, Claire. That’s why I couldn’t make myself fall for you. That’s why I left you in the end, because I didn’t want you to get hurt by whatever happens to me.”

“Oh, my God,” Claire said once she had finally absorbed Owen’s words. “I didn’t know that that was what you were thinking about the whole time. Oh, God, Grady, I am so sorry. I really am.”

“All water under the bridge, Dearing,” Owen waved off.

“But…” Claire continued. “Have you ever, um, you know, felt afraid for your life? And I’m not talking about your time with the raptors, you know. I’m talking about the time you spent in the Navy and the SEALs. Have you ever been afraid for yourself or for your family during your missions?”

“Actually, no,” Owen replied. “When I was out on missions, I’ve never really felt afraid at all. It’s kind of like whatever happens, happens. If I make it through then yay me. If I get shot then either the bad guys got lucky or I got unlucky. But I’ve never thought about dying on a mission. And I guess it was because I didn’t really think about it all that much. But there was this one time….” Owen took a deep breath then let it out slowly as one long sigh.

“There was this one time our ship made a port call in the Philippines,” Owen continued. “We stopped over at our old base in Subic Bay. Me and a bunch of other guys, SEALs, Marines and sailors, went out on shore leave. We had this minder from the Philippine Navy with us, just kind of making sure that we didn’t get into too much trouble. But things did get a little wild, and then the next we just found out that one of the Marines that went out with us had killed a prostitute when the Marine found out that the hooker was actually a he and not a she, if you know what I mean? Well, the Marine surrendered to the local police, but the minder told us that despite that, the rest of the locals were still out for our blood.

“Anyway, that wasn’t even the last of it. One night after the Marine had turned himself in for killing the tranny hooker, I was once again with another bunch of sailors and Marines when this couple walked up to us and asked if we needed any help getting around. As the others were trying to tell the couple that we didn’t need any help, I happened to look out to the road, and that’s when I saw two guys on a motorcycle. Actually, it wasn’t even a motorcycle; more like a scooter or a moped. But anyway, I saw those two guys on the moped, and the guy on the back had a gun out. I shouted to my buddies to take cover as the guy on the moped opened fire. It all happened so fast. When the shooting finally stopped, the couple was gone and the moped was riding away as fast as it could go, and one of the sailors with us was dead. Radioman’s Mate First Class Brad Weller, his name was. And right then and there, that was the first time that I ever felt afraid for my life. You have no idea how terrible it is to feel that an entire city is after you and wants to kill you. Nothing compares to the feeling of being hunted by your fellow human being. Not even raptors can come close to doing that. Raptors will just slash your belly open and eat your guts as they spill out. Humans are way more inventive about the ways we can kill each other. Heck, we don’t even have to touch the other guy to make them afraid. Mental torture’s a very effective tool all in itself as well. That’s what really scared me right then and there.

“Anyway, NCIS opened an investigation. JAG called for the identification and the extradition of the shooter and his getaway driver but until know, there’s been no word from the PNP, the Philippine National Police. I mean, there’s totally a double standard at work here. There they are, shouting for justice for the tranny whore that our Marine killed but no one over there even so much as bat an eyelid when one of the US Navy’s sailors was shot and killed in the very same town. I mean, I’m all for LGBT rights and everything, but what about our sailor that got killed? I mean, that’s not right, is it? It was the sense of helplessness that really got to me. And, I have to admit, I can feel that same feeling of helplessness right now. It’s like something is actively trying to keep us on this island until we die,” Owen admitted. “I mean, it’s like I have no idea what to do now. That chopper was our best shot of getting out of here, and you know how that turned out. I just don’t know if I can keep doing it tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after that.”

“Well, look on the good side,” Claire offered. “This time alone that we’ve got with each other is a very great time for us to finally do something about this screwed up to the max thing we call our relationship.”

“Nah,” Owen muttered, shaking his head even though he knew Claire couldn’t see him. “Hell will have frozen over before we’re done cutting through that Gordian knot.”

“Well, it was worth a shot,” Claire said. “Hey, since you already took watch for the both of us last night, how about I take watch tonight? You know, take turns.”

“Are you sure about that, Dearing?” Owen asked. “Are you sure you can handle yourself?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

“All right then. Here, take my gun.” Owen took off his Marlin Model 1895 rifle and reached it out, butt forward, towards Claire.

“Wait, what? No!” Claire said. “I can’t! I’ve never ever used a gun before! Well, not a real gun anyway.”

“Okay then. And what are you gonna use to defend us when a predator goes near? Your blouse? Your heels?”

“Well, no, but I —”

“Just take my gun, Claire. Please,” Owen insisted.

“All right, all right, I’m taking it,” Claire said, grabbing the Marlin rifle and then securing it to her body as soon as she got hold of it. Once she had the Marlin in both hands, Claire then held it the way that she had seen Owen do when he had the gun. It was actually surprisingly heavy considering that it was supposed to be the shortened version or something like it. She also practiced what she needed to do to reload the gun once she had fired a shot as the Marlin 1895 was a lever-action rifle, and then Claire looked through the scope mounted on top of the rifle to get a feel of what it was like to aim this thing. That done, Claire nestled the rifle on her lap and leaned back on the tree trunk to look up at the moonlit sky. She really hoped that no predator would come pay them a visit tonight as she, like Owen, felt like she didn’t have the strength left to deal with any more shit that this island threw at them.

Maybe there would come a time that the two of them would finally be able to fix their relationship, or at the very least give it a more amicable end. But right now, what Claire Dearing really wanted was to get off this island. And maybe a nice hot cup of green tea waiting for her once she got back.


	12. Trap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Owen and Claire find a bunch of booby traps in their path as they try to make their way to safety.

The flare burned red-hot in her hand. The whirring of the servomotors as they lifted up the paddock gate became a steady and monotonous drone in the back of her mind. Already, she could feel the ground trembling from the impact of the footfalls. The trees inside the paddock rustled as the creature made its way towards the opening gate. Finally, she saw it: _Tyrannosaurus rex_ , the tyrant lizard king, the most famous dinosaur in the world. The tyrannosaur’s eyes reflected the light of the flare in her hand, and right then and there she knew she had the dinosaur’s full and unwavering attention. Now there was only one thing left to do: run.

She took off, her heels powering her through the puddles that had collected on the ground following yet another one of Nublar’s sudden rainstorms, and behind her she heard the tyrannosaur roar as it went off in pursuit of her, or more specifically the flare in her hand. She didn’t dare look back lest her feet trip her up and turn her into _T. rex_ food or a bloody pulp under the dinosaur’s foot. _Run, run, run, just run!_ were the only things in her mind as she continued to run. Finally, she saw the pathway opening up to the main street leading up the visitors’ center, and she saw the mounted _Spinosaurus_ skeleton and ran past it. The _Indominus rex_ was just beyond. She threw the flare straight at the _Indominus_ ’ flank, and the hybrid turned to look at what it was that had hit its side. She then heard something smash into the spino skeleton and she fell to the ground, and she saw both the _Tyrannosaurus_ and the _Indominus_ now roaring and sizing up each other. Then both animals bellowed and ran towards each other, jaws opened to their maximum.

Claire Dearing woke up from her dream of the battle between the _Tyrannosaurus_ and the _Indominus_. She was no longer on Isla Nublar; she was on an entirely different island altogether. Beams of light streamed down to her eyes from above, disrupted only by the leaves on the tree canopy above her. Claire blinked and made to rub away the grime in the corners of her eyes before she felt a long weight on her lap. She then remembered that she still had the Marlin M1895 rifle with her so she held on to it with one hand while she used the other to wipe away her eye grit. _Good thing no one can see me right now_ , she thought.

Once again, Claire realized that she had managed to fall asleep after spending yet another night on this godforsaken island. Well, maybe this time, she had good reason to fall asleep. There was no _Spinosaurus_ or other massive carnivorous dinosaur nearby, and the raptors that had passed them by earlier in the day hadn’t returned, so really there really wasn’t too much threat to their lives that night, and that was probably why falling asleep had been easier to do last night than two nights previous.

Speaking of which, Claire craned her neck around towards the branch where Owen Grady had set himself up. Grady was still fast asleep, and Claire was prepared to swear on her life that the man was snoring. “Grady,” she called out. “Grady. Owen!”

Owen stopped snoring, shook his head, and then he opened his eyes blearily. “What’s going on?” he asked, or rather slurred. “What’s up?” he asked, looking at Claire.

“Um, I don’t know how to say this, but I think it’s morning,” Claire replied.

“Yeah, like I couldn’t see that for myself,” Owen muttered as he stretched as much as he could without falling off of the branch. “Why’d you wake me up for?”

“Well, I was hoping that you had another plan to get us out of here,” Claire said. “I didn’t think you were the kind of person who likes being stuck up a tree, you know.”

“Clearly, I’m still working on it, aren’t I?” Owen then looked down at the forest floor and asked, “Did anything come our way last night?

“No, I don’t think so,” Claire replied. “No raptors, no rexes, no spino; heck, not even a compy.”

“Don’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet,” Owen said. “We might still be in the hunting range of those feathered raptors. But, having said that….” Owen strained to hear anything remotely close to a raptor vocalization with his ears but got nothing. “Seeing as I can’t hear them right now, they might just be at the other edge of their territory.”

“Do you know how to get us out of their territory?” Claire asked.

“I don’t know if it’ll get us out of the feathered raptors’ territory, but I do know a place where we can get some better shelter than being this high up the trees.”

“You’re not talking about the warehouse, are you? I really don’t want to have to stay at that warehouse if I don’t have to,” Claire said.

“We’re not going back to the warehouse,” Owen asserted. “Trust me, I don’t want to go back there just as much as you do. But there is an airstrip over to the west. It’s a pretty basic strip, basically just packed dirt with a tower, a terminal and some fuel pumps for the planes, but it should have a working radio. Old InGen used the strip to supply the original Site B back in the early nineties before they had to abandon it because of Clarissa, and I think it’s still active as an emergency alternate strip in case all of the other strips on this place are unavailable. However, like I said, I don’t know if it’s within the feathered raptors’ range or not.”

“I mean, even if it is within the raptors’ range, surely it’s a lot safer there than being on this tree branch?”

“Don’t be too sure. Raptors can break through plate glass and plywood walls. But, if it _is_ outside the raptors’ range… it might just be worth a shot to get there.” Owen then leapt to his feet and began going down the tree before finally landing softly on the ground. “All right, your turn,” he called up to Claire.

“Ah, shit,” Claire muttered, and then she slowly dropped herself down from the branch on which she had spent the night. She went down the tree slowly, making sure that both her handholds and footrests were steady and stable before she continued on down.

“All right, you’re nearly there,” Owen called out. Right at that moment, Claire’s foot slipped on the tree bark and she yelled and clung on to the knots and burls that she had been using to hold on to the tree. “I can’t do it!” she shouted. “I can’t do it, man!”

“Yes, you can!” Owen shouted. He immediately ran underneath the place where Claire was now hanging on for dear life. “I’ll catch you! Just jump!”

“Are you crazy!? You want me to jump?” Claire asked.

“And I’ll catch you!” Owen insisted. He held out his arms both to prepare himself and to show Claire that he was serious.

“Oh, shit,” Claire said. This was most definitely not how she thought this day would go. Then again, she couldn’t have imagined that the _Indominus_ would be able to escape its paddock and cause the destruction and mayhem that it did on Jurassic World. “All right, get ready! Here I come!” she shouted, and then she pushed herself away and off of the tree and towards Owen’s waiting arms. Claire felt herself land on something soft and then the next thing she knew, she was lying on top of Owen’s chest and stomach.

“You know what?” Owen muttered as he and Claire went face-to-face for the first time in a long time. “This reminds me of something.”

“What is it?” Claire asked softly as well.

“Your knees just landed on my testicles!” Owen gasped. Claire immediately apologized as she rolled away from Owen, who then curled up into a fetal position as he struggled to regain his breath and his composure after the accidental and unexpected attack on his manhood.

“Hey, I already said I’m sorry!” Claire insisted. “You’re just exaggerating now.”

“You try getting a knee to the groin and see how you feel,” Owen muttered as he finally managed to get himself onto a standing position but with his hands still on his knees. He took one more deep breath before he was finally able to stand up straight. “You know what, let’s get out of here before my shouts of pain attract any animals to us,” he muttered, and he and Claire set off through the forest. They walked on for four hours according to Owen’s watch and then, as noon passed by and the sunlight shone down on them straight from the canopy, Owen stopped in his tracks. Claire followed suit and asked him, “What’s going on?”

“I don’t like the look of this at all,” Owen replied.

“What? What don’t you like the look of?” Claire asked.

“Hand me my rifle, will you?” Owen said. Claire took the Marlin rifle from her shoulder and gave it to Owen. He turned the rifle around so that the buttstock was facing away from him. “Stay close to me but stay back a little bit too,” he told her as he approached a pile of fallen leaves in the middle of the path they were walking. Owen used the butt of his rifle to move aside as much of the leaves as he could, and then he hit something hard and wooden. “What is it?” Claire asked him breathlessly.

Owen said nothing; instead, he swept aside even more leaves with his rifle until he had finally revealed the flat wooden panel underneath. “Oh, boy, this is certainly not good,” he muttered. He then looked around for something until he finally picked up a baseball-sized rock which he then tossed towards the wooden board. The board immediately dropped open into a large pit hidden underneath, and the pile of leaves fell into the pit with the rock. “Booby trap,” he said to Claire.

“Yeah, like I couldn’t see that for myself,” she scoffed. She then moved closer to the edge of the pit and saw, to her great shock and surprise, the decaying carcass of a juvenile velociraptor impaled on sharp wooden spikes planted at the bottom of the pit. There was a loud buzzing from the flies that had gathered upon the carcass, and small green shapes revealed themselves to be _Procompsognathus triassicus_ trying to scavenge what they could from the dead raptor. The juvenile’s bright orange skin with brown stripes resembling that of a tiger was already sloughing off in places to reveal the bloating fat and muscle underneath. “Oh, my God,” she muttered.

Even though she knew perfectly well the awesome power, intelligence and menace of the velociraptor and had even seen the animals’ attacking prowess firsthand, there was still a part of her which was saddened by the sight of such a legendary creature in such a sorry state.

“Well, this booby trap definitely means both good news and bad news for us,” Owen said. “The good news is that we’re definitely getting away from the carnivores and closer to some humans. We humans are the only ones capable of creating traps like these.”

“And what’s the bad news?”

“Let’s just say that the people we’re about to come across are very determined to keep everyone and everything out of their territory.”

“Are you talking about one of the local tribes?” Claire asked.

“No,” Owen replied. “Original InGen moved all the locals off the island back to mainland Costa Rica when they were still building Site B. No, these are definitely guys who don’t like any unwanted visitors. If this is how they treat raptors, imagine what they’ll do to the two of us.”

“Well, that’s definitely bad news, indeed. But who _are_ they?”

“Right now, I can only think of two possibilities; each of them as dangerous as the other. Either they’re dinosaur hunters or they’re a drug cartel.”

“Okay, I think I understand why dinosaur hunters would be on this island,” Claire said as she absorbed the facts, “but what could a drug cartel be doing here? Are they planting opium or marijuana or coca here or something?”

“They’re not here to plant stuff, that’s for sure,” Owen replied. “They’re probably using the island as a way to help their planes bypass Central American radar on their way to Mexico and eventually the US. I remember that Nublar used to be used by the cartels as a refueling stop back in the 80s before Hammond and InGen bought the island for the original Jurassic Park. The cartels then used Sorna and the rest of the Five Deaths to bypass Central America before InGen also bought Sorna and the cartels had to use the other islands or risk passing right through Central America. Then InGen abandoned Nublar in ’93 and Sorna soon after, and the cartels took advantage of their absence to reclaim their stopovers and bypasses. Jurassic World forced the cartels out of Nublar once again but they’ve practically carved out a home for themselves in Sorna, and if it’s true that we’re not gonna try and reclaim Jurassic World anymore, I could see the cartels coming back to Nublar yet again.”

“Okay, that explains things,” Claire said, “but who do you think could have made this particular trap? Probably not the hunters because, from what I’ve heard about dinosaur hunters, they’re not the types who would leave any kind of dinosaur carcass just lying around to rot.”

“Yeah, you’re right about that,” Owen agreed. “We need to be very careful now, even more careful than when we were trying to track your nephews in the Nublar restricted zone. Remember, these cartels don’t trust outsiders; they don’t trust outsiders who quote-unquote ‘stumble’ upon their territory; and they sure as hell don’t trust any Americans.”

They continued walking, sidestepping the spike pit trap with the dead juvenile raptor and continuing on towards potentially bumping into a drug cartel hiding in the middle of Isla Sorna. It was their only choice, really, apart from staying in the jungle and bumping into the feathered raptors and being killed and eaten by those dinosaurs. One could bargain with another human, even one from a drug cartel; a raptor would just kill and move on.

As they neared the edge of the forest, Owen pointed at the pile of chalky white spoor. “That’s hadrosaur dung right there,” he said. “We’re finally out of carnivore country.”

“Yeah,” Claire nodded. “But it might as well be out of the pan and into the fire if you’re right about the cartel being here.”

“Yeah, let’s maybe try not to think about that just yet,” Owen said, and they continued walking on down the edge of the forest until they finally came across a dirt road that appeared to have been used somewhat recently. They followed the road and encountered no more dinosaurs until they finally reached a grassy plain that was on the edge of a cliff. The dirt road they were following went straight for the edge before finally turning right and following the edge down to the plain below. “That’s it; that’s the cliff,” Owen said as they approached the edge. “We’re nearly there. Come on!”

A row of shrubs that had once been neatly manicured but was now growing wild and into brambles lined the side of the road nearest to the cliff edge. Owen and Claire ran for these thick shrubs and hid behind them as they peered down the cliff and onto the plain below.

A long airstrip consisting mostly of flat packed earth lay in the middle of the plain that was below the cliff on which they stood. A small but substantial terminal had been built around the strip’s control tower, and around those two structures was a large camp complete with living quarters, a canteen or mess hall and a number of outhouses. Armed guards wearing mismatched combinations of civilian and military gear patrolled every corner of the camp, setting it apart from every other place on Isla Sorna. These guards carried Kalashnikov-style assault rifles and other such weapons, and the majority of them stood watch over piles upon piles of bricks of white powder packed into plastic cling wrap. Owen’s suspicions were confirmed: they had just stumbled upon a massive drug smuggling operation right here in the heart of Isla Sorna.

“Oh, great,” Claire muttered as she looked at the camp around the airstrip. “Now what are we going to do?”

“We definitely can’t go straight through their camp,” Owen said. “We won’t make it one step past their perimeter before they shoot us both down. Our only choice now is to go around the camp, keep as much distance between ourselves and them as we can, cross the airstrip and hope that they aren’t going to use it just yet and then get into the control tower somehow and hope that no one is in there acting as a lookout or monitoring the radio.”

“If it still works,” Claire said. “Look, how sure are you that the radio in this place is still working? For all we know, the cartel took out the original radio and are now using their own.”

“That’s actually better for us because if the cartel has their own radio, we won’t to worry about trying to see if we can still fix the original radio. Or rather I won’t have to worry about having to fix the older radio. But we gotta move now. If the guy running this camp is a smart cookie, he’ll have patrols going up and down this road because any guy who’s lost is obviously going to follow the road, hoping that it’ll lead to somewhere safe. We’re already pushing our luck staying here this long. I’ll go ahead. You keep watch of our six. That means our backs.”

“I know what ‘watch your six’ means, Grady,” Claire retorted.

It was the softest of noises, the heel of a well-worn boot landing on hard-packed dirt and soil. Owen didn’t even have to turn and look to know what it was. But for Claire, it wasn’t until she heard something talking and/or shouting in rapid-fire Spanish that she realized that someone else had discovered their presence on this island. And even though she didn’t understand what the gun-toting Spanish-speaking man was saying, she understood very well what he was telling them to do.

Owen and Claire both raised their hands level with their heads and slowly turned around to face their would-be captors. Two men carrying FN FAL rifles were looking straight at them, and their weapons were also pointed towards the two Americans. One of the cartel guards said something in Spanish and Claire saw Owen slowly drop his gun to the ground.

“I say drop the gun!” the guard shouted in halting English this time, and Owen laid the butt of his rifle down on the ground and lowered the gun onto the dirt slowly. Just as slowly, Owen got back to a standing position and raised his hands over his head once again. “Who are you and where you from?” the guard asked.

“We’re from InGen, man,” Owen said. “We’re from Jurassic World. We’re not from the army or the police.” Owen winced as soon as the words left his mouth. That was a stupid thing to say, he thought. Costa Rica didn’t have an army anymore, not since 1948 after their president abolished the army in the aftermath of a devastating civil war.

When Owen’s words expectedly got the mystified looks from the cartel guards, Claire stepped in and said, “Please, we don’t mean any harm. We just want to get to our facility in the south of the island. We won’t say anything about you guys being here. We won’t blab about your place. Just don’t kill us, please.”

The radio on the guard who had spoken to the two of them crackled to life. Someone spoke from the radio in Spanish, and the guard replied also in Spanish. Both Owen and Claire caught a few words here and there of their conversation, words like “gringos”, “InGen” and “Mundo Jurasico” (the direct Spanish translation of Jurassic World). The guard ended with “ _Si, jefe_ ,” and he nodded his head at his partner, who tilted his head to the side and moved his rifle sideways as well. “ _Seguir! Muevete, gringos_!” he commanded the two Americans, who meekly complied and set off down the dirt road, followed and closely monitored by the two cartel guards. The lead guard then nodded his head once again, and then both guards struck Owen and Claire with the butts of their rifles, and both Americans dropped to the ground unconscious.


	13. Cartel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A drug cartel using Isla Sorna as a staging ground for the movement of their product into Mexico and the US has to deal with the arrival of two Americans in their camp.

Even before International Genetics had leased the islands of Nublar and Sorna from the Costa Rican government, people had already been using the aforementioned islands for their own purposes. Taking advantage of the locals’ superstitions regarding the islands, the nascent drug cartels of the eighties established bases on the islands, as well as the rest of the Five Deaths, to serve as refueling stopovers for their drug runners, both boats and planes, and as caches where they could store their narcotics, or “product”, away from the prying eyes of government forces. The arrival of InGen on both Nublar and Sorna in the late eighties complicated matters somewhat, and then when the cartels encountered their first dinosaurs on the islands, they simply didn’t know what to do or how to deal with the dinosaurs. They couldn’t tell anyone else about the dinosaurs because that would only raise awkward questions about what they were doing on the islands in the first place. And even if someone listened to them, would they be believed? They were talking about dinosaurs walking the earth once again, and everyone knew that dinosaurs no longer existed. It was simply too outlandish to believe, and the cartels also had to protect their own interests on the islands.

Then the truth about InGen, Jurassic Park, and Site B was exposed in 1997 when a _Tyrannosaurus rex_ had rampaged in San Diego, and both Nublar and Sorna became protected biological preserves and restricted areas closely monitored by the Costa Rican government with the cooperation of the United Nations and the World Wildlife Fund. But that actually worked out in favor of the cartels because that meant that the UN and the Costa Ricans were more interested in chasing down people who wanted a glimpse of InGen’s dinosaurs, and the cartels already knew how to evade detection and pursuit. But then the Masrani Group came along to resurrect John Hammond’s dream of a dinosaur theme park in the form of Jurassic World, and the cartels were forced off of Isla Nublar once again. Because the layout of Jurassic World meant that it would take up the southern half of Nublar and the northern half was marked off as a restricted area (something that the cartels accepted because expeditions sent there to establish camps had resulted in massive casualties for the cartels), the establishment of Jurassic World meant that the cartels had to move most of their resupply operations to the Five Deaths, specifically Isla Sorna, the largest island in the chain. There, the only things that they really had to worry about were the free-range dinosaurs that dated back to the original Site B (the Jurassic World scientists had kept their cloning operations to the southwest of the island).

The death of the Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in 1993 and the subsequent decline and fall of his Medellin Cartel had given smaller and less powerful cartels cowering under his shadow to finally flourish and stake their own claims in the lucrative drug trade as well as fill in the power vacuum created by Escobar’s death. One of those cartels was the Mitu Cartel. Even though the Mitu Cartel had by now moved on to nicer and swankier locations in Colombia like Bogota, Cali, and Barranquilla, it still bore the name of the small and unassuming town in southern Colombia near the border with Brazil where it was founded. And much of the product that the cartel supplies to its clients in the United States and Europe (among others) still came from the area around Mitu and was harvested by the local population under the watchful eye of the hometown cartel.

The Mitu Cartel was one of three cartels from Colombia which used Isla Sorna as a staging point for its transport of drugs to Mexico and the United States. The members of the Mitu Cartel knew that the other Colombian cartels, as well as some Mexican cartels, also used Sorna to resupply and refuel their drug runners, but they didn’t really care all that much about it so long as they all didn’t cross paths on the island. It was a “mind your own business and we’ll mind ours” situation, even though some of these cartels were considered rivals and would be fighting it out on the mainland.

The Mitu Cartel’s camp on Sorna was located right beside a massive dirt airstrip almost smack dab in the middle of the island. It had been a very lucky break for the cartel and quite possibly one of the biggest contributing factors to their recent success despite the war on drugs ramping up quite steeply coming into the new millennium. All the basic structures that they needed, from the housing and barracks for the foot soldiers and fuel for the airplanes, were already in place, and they could construct any additional structures that they might need using basic construction materials that were already around like lumber or could be easily brought in like sheet metal roofing.

The cartel’s camp was commanded by, most surprisingly, a young woman, in reality the niece of the third cousin twice removed of one of the leaders, or “jefes” of the Mitu Cartel. It was a way of easing her into the “family business” without too much fuss. After all, the only trouble that she would have to deal with on the island was the numerous dinosaurs roaming around, and her predecessors had already seen to it that the camp was well-defended from the threat of the dinosaurs.

To the men manning and guarding the camp, she was called “la jefe”, both as a mark of respect and as part of cartel protocol (all of the Mitu Cartel’s leaders, with a few notable exceptions, were referred to as “jefe” to protect their identities from potential spies within the cartel sent by other cartels or even the government authorities). To the leadership of the Mitu Cartel, she was known as Chiquita mainly because of her girly looks and especially her wide smile, which was very much at odds with her personality and her eventual role within the cartel. That was also why she was being groomed for a leadership role within the cartel, because she simply didn’t fit the profile of a cartel member, let alone a cartel leader. And the braver members of the cartel called her (behind her back of course) “La Bruja”, or “The Witch” in English. La Jefe after all had a brutal temper that, when triggered, would transform her into something very definitely like a witch. It was just one more thing about La Jefe, or Chiquita, or La Bruja (however one chose to address her) that was completely at odds with her quiet and unassuming outward appearance.

At the moment, La Jefe was relaxing in her personal quarters inside the cartel camp when one of the guards ran in, panting and almost breathless. “Jefe, we’ve just made contact with the runner,” he said as soon as he had caught his breath. “Peralta wants to talk to you.”

“All right, I’m coming,” La Jefe sighed as she got up and followed the guard to the control tower beside the terminal building which the cartel was now using as a warehouse to store their product awaiting shipment to Mexico and the US. La Jefe climbed up the stairs two at a time as when Peralta wanted to talk, he didn’t want to be kept waiting. Once she was at the air traffic controllers’ area in the tower, one of the men manning the radio handed her a set of headphones with attached microphone, and another controller spoke on the microphone before him, “La Jefe’s here, jefe.”

“What’s going on, Joey?” La Jefe asked. “Why are you calling me so late? It’s nine in the evening already.”

“Have you heard the news, Chiquita?” Joey asked in reply.

“What news, man? The reception in this place isn’t exactly that good, remember.”

“Look, I don’t know how serious the situation is right now or is going to be later, but apparently the dinosaurs got loose in Jurassic World and killed some tourists before they were finally put down.”

“So? What do I care about that?” Chiquita asked. “That happened in Nublar, not Sorna, right?”

“So that means that the Jurassic World people are going to come down there to Sorna and capture their dinosaurs so they can restock their dinosaur zoo and keep the money flowing into their pockets as soon as someone recertifies that the place is safe for tourists once again. You better tell the guards to keep their eyes open,” Peralta said.

“Yeah, Joey, about that,” Chiquita trailed off. “Candelo and Velez already brought in two Americans earlier this afternoon, a man and a woman. They both claimed that they were from InGen and Jurassic World. The man had a gun on him so he must be from their security and the woman looked like the corporate type so she must be the supervisor or one of the supervisors of their operation. Anyway, I had Candelo lock the gringos up, and I was thinking that maybe we could trade the two of them for some of our friends being held over in San Jose.”

“Yeah, well, I was just about to say that your guys shouldn’t have touched those two gringos in the first place,” Peralta said. “But what’s done is done. Those gringos will certainly complicate matters later on but I think we can handle it. All right. As you can tell, I’m already on the next flight there. After we refuel and get the product onboard, I’m taking the gringos with me. We will negotiate with the authorities for them on the mainland. So tell your guards to keep an eye on the gringos. They might be worth a lot. And we don’t want them becoming dinosaur food now, do we?”

“No, Joey, of course not,” Chiquita replied.

“All right, the pilots say that we should be there on the island between thirty minutes and an hour from now,” Peralta said. “See you then.”

“All right. Chiquita out.”

When La Jefe left the control tower to walk back to her quarters, she couldn’t help but feel that she had disappointed the man known only as Peralta and, by extension, the rest of the cartel’s leadership, when she had told Peralta of the capture and imprisonment of the two gringos from InGen. The way Peralta said that he was going to take the gringos with him to the mainland with the latest shipment gave Chiquita the impression that he didn’t trust her to look after the captives properly. Well, the idea to lock them up and then trade them for imprisoned cartel members in Costa Rica had been Candelo’s, but Chiquita had claimed the idea as hers, hoping to prove to Peralta and the rest of the jefes that she could be trusted to make big decisions for the cartel. But instead Chiquita suspected that all that she had proved to the other jefes was the fact that she still had a lot to learn. And the simple matter of the fact was that she did indeed still have a lot to learn; she just wished that they wouldn’t come as suddenly as this particular lesson did.

La Jefe walked over to the hut that was serving as a makeshift cell for the two American captives. The more that she looked at these gringos, the more that she was convinced that what Peralta had said could be true, that these two were indeed the advance party sent by InGen to Sorna to find the dinosaurs that they needed to bring back to their Jurassic Park after the original animals had broken out and killed the tourists. Both Candelo and Velez had said that the man spoke Spanish before the woman butted and spoke in English, and they had both said that they were from Jurassic World. Everything just fit perfectly in Chiquita’s mind. All in all, she was a little bit glad that she had followed Candelo’s advice to hang on to the InGen people and ask for a ransom later instead of the hotheaded and impetuous Velez, who had wanted to shoot the gringos and let the dinosaurs dispose of the bodies. Well, there was always next time. La Jefe walked away from the captives and moved back to her quarters.


	14. Compy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Owen makes use of a very ingenious (and unlikely) trick to help him and Claire escape from the cartel.

Owen Grady woke up slowly and painfully, and the first thing that he felt as soon as he regained consciousness was a throbbing lump of pain on the back of his head, a lump that felt as big as a chicken egg and throbbed to the beat of his heart. The rest of the world returned to him at the pace of molasses on a cold Minnesota morning, but as the world finally resolved itself, Owen noticed that he was hogtied, with his ankles tied to a wooden beam and his wrists bound to some kind of rocklike ceiling fixture. He also saw that he was being kept inside a wooden or bamboo hut, and that he could see the rest of the cartel’s camp outside through the gaps in the planking. He then turned his head and saw, both to his surprise and relief, Claire Dearing hanging upside down beside him. Her feet and ankles were tied to a rocklike fixture similar to that to which Owen’s hands were tied. Her arms and wrists were tied up to the same wooden beam to which Owen’s ankles were bound.

The first thing that Owen thought when he saw Claire was, _Thank God she’s alive._ The cartel wouldn’t have tied her up like that if she was already dead or if they had other more disturbing plans for her. The second thing that came to Owen’s mind was, _why is gravity upside-down all of a sudden?_ If Claire was supposed to be tied upside down then the laws of gravity would dictate that her hair would be falling down and touching the ground, and so would her skirt… Owen had some very clear memories of what lay under Claire’s clothes, and he had never imagined that red lingerie on a redhead would look so hot until then. He had thought that the red hair and the red lingerie would clash with each other, but they didn’t….

The third thing that came to Owen’s mind was the realization that it was actually _he_ who was upside down. It was his ankles and Claire’s hands which were tied to the roof, and the things that he thought were rocklike ceiling fixtures were actually real rocks used to weigh them down and keep them from swinging around on their ropes.

“Oh, good, you’re finally awake,” Claire said when she finally saw that Owen was up and moving. “I was wondering if maybe you had popped a vein in your head already. My parents had always told me that hanging upside down for a long time is bad for you because all the blood rushes to your head.”

“I don’t know how that’s exactly bad for you, but I am feeling kind of faint right now,” Owen replied.

“So…” Claire trailed off. “Aren’t you going to get us out of here?”

Owen groaned. “Trust me, Dearing,” he said, “if I knew a way to get us both out of here then I’d have already done it. That being said, though…” Owen angled his head around to see if he could see the knots that were tying him up. If he could only tell what knot it was, then he could maybe try to extricate himself out of this by untying the knots…

Owen began to shift his hands and wrists around inside the knot to try and loosen up the rope binding him tight right now. The rope was made of rough hemp and soon Owen could feel his wrists chafing against the rope. He noticed this and immediately slowed down his efforts to break free.

At that moment, both Owen and Claire heard a small chirping and chittering hoot. Both of them froze instantly even though both of them couldn’t see what it was that was making the sound. Finally, a small green dinosaur no bigger than a chicken hopped through the gaps in the hut’s wooden planking walls and chittered. It then began to walk towards Owen, its head bobbing forward and back, also like a chicken. And even though Owen knew that the dinosaur posed little threat to him, he still tried to stay still as part of the response triggered in the primeval instinctive part of his brain.

For her part, Claire didn’t act too surprised or shocked to see the dinosaur inside the hut with them. “That’s a compy, right?” she asked.

“Yep,” Owen replied. “And not just _Procompsognathus_. It’s the real deal. Now I’m glad these guys tied us up like this and didn’t just leave us knocked out on the ground.”

“Why? I thought compys were scavengers.”

“Yeah, primarily, but they wouldn’t hesitate to finish off a wounded animal if they have the advantage of numbers. Some of the handlers also said that their bite is mildly poisonous, but whether they produce the venom themselves or if it’s just bacteria on their teeth like with a Komodo dragon’s bite is still unknown.”

“But what is it doing here?” Claire asked. “Can it smell us? Does it smell us? Does it know that we can’t defend ourselves against it right now?”

“I don’t know,” Owen replied. “Maybe it can smell us. Maybe it can sense us in ways that we can’t even possibly imagine. But I don’t know if it can sense your fear. It’s not a movie monster, you know.”

The compy jerked its head around, seemingly looking for something, and then it darted towards Owen. More specifically, it darted for the rope binding Owen to the rock below him. The compy sniffed at the rope, and its tongue flicked in and out of its mouth, seemingly tasting the rope. Then, to the surprise of the two humans, the compy began biting at the rope, tearing away at the twisted hemp fibers.

“Is it… eating the rope?” Claire asked breathlessly.

Owen wanted to answer Claire’s question, but at the same time, he was afraid that any movement on his part would scare the compy away. Here was an organism, an animal that had once been on this planet hundreds of millions of years ago and had then gone extinct millions of years before there was another animal around to twist hemp into rope, and it was now chewing away at the thick Manila hemp rope. Owen had a number of theories about why the compy was eating the rope: maybe the compy thought the rope was some kind of dead or dying animal, and that it was scavenging what it could from the body before something else came to claim the kill. Owen had noticed that there was some blood on the rope, most probably from where those cartel guards had hit the back of his head to knock him out. Maybe the blood in the rope was setting off the compy’s instincts to scavenge and finish off its “meal”. To prove his own theory, Owen made to try something out.

Slowly but deliberately, Owen began rubbing his wrists on the rope once again. He tried to mimic his efforts to shake the ropes loose, but he tried to do this slowly as he was afraid that any sort of quick movements on his part would make the compy think that the rope was still “alive” and it would run away. Because of this slow pace, it took Owen a few minutes before he finally managed to draw blood, and even then it was just the slow drip and flow of a surface wound. And what blood was coming out of his rubbed-raw wrists wasn’t making it all the way down to where the compy was biting the rope before it was absorbed by the fibers. “Come on, you son of a bitch, keep biting at that thing,” Owen muttered to the compy.

“Grady, what the hell are you doing?” Claire hissed.

“I’m trying to get the both of us out of here, Dearing,” Owen replied in an equally low and hoarse whisper. “Come on, man, just a few more bites,” he said to the compy as he continued rubbing his wrists at the rope to keep them bleeding. By then, the compsognathus had already bitten through at least half of the rope tying Owen down, and he could see that there was some red around the dinosaur’s mouth. Then suddenly, the compy looked up from the rope, looked around in jerking and birdlike motions, and then it chittered loudly and turned tail, running out of the same gap in the planking from which it had come in. “No, no, don’t go!” Owen said, and then he uttered a soft “Shit!” before he followed that up with a string of curses and swears.

“Well, so much for that compy biting you free,” Claire mused once Owen had finally calmed himself down.

“Oh, this is bullshit,” Owen muttered. He then looked down at the frayed rope where the compy had bitten through before it ran away. “Now let’s just hope that that’s enough for me to finally break free,” he said. Owen then began tugging at the rope in an effort to tear apart the fibers that the compy hadn’t yet bitten through before it had split. It took him a few tries, but eventually the rope broke apart with a loud snap, and Owen found himself now swinging freely.

“Now for the hard part,” he said, flashing Claire a smile before he swung his upper body around until he could finally reach the knot tying him to the ceiling beam. He grunted as he untied the knot, and then with one final grunt, he managed to work his feet free. Owen hung on to the rope for a few more seconds before he let go, dropping down to the ground on his boots. He immediately ran over to Claire and untied the ropes binding her legs to the rock below her, and then as he began to untie her arms, he said, “Grab onto me as soon as you start to fall.” As soon as he had loosened the ropes enough for Claire’s slim wrists to slip through, she wrapped her arms around Owen’s shoulders and neck. Claire also bent her legs so that she wouldn’t have too much of a bumpy landing, but the way she tried to do this meant that she ended up straddling Owen by accident when she did finally come down, and Claire fell on top of Owen as both of them fell to the floor.

“Ouch!” both of them cried out at the same time, and then both of them tried to settle their nerves by taking deep breaths. Claire stared and Owen, and Owen stared back at Claire, and for a moment both of them almost forgot that they were stranded on an island full of dinosaurs and currently being held captive by a drug cartel. Almost. Then, as if on cue, Owen said,” Well, this is awkward,” immediately breaking the spell between them.

“Yep, definitely awkward,” Claire agreed, and she picked herself up off of Owen and brushed off the dirt that had clung to her during their brief stay on the ground. She then helped untie Owen’s wrists, and that allowed him to dust himself off as well. Owen then looked at the raw and bleeding chafing marks that he had inflicted on himself to attract the compy and shook his head. “That’s gonna leave a mark,” he said to himself, and then to Claire, he asked her, “Can I borrow your blouse for a moment?”

“Sure,” she replied, untying the blouse tied around her waist. The blouse had originally been white but was now stained with blood, dirt, oil, and dung. That last thing was a completely avoidable situation that she didn’t have to inflict on herself if she had only kept her hands to herself and not tried to be a smartass. “Although I don’t really see what use you would have for it—”

Owen took the blouse and immediately tore off two strips of cloth from it. He then used the cloth strips as makeshift bandages for his wounds. “What the hell are you doing!” Claire hissed, snatching her blouse out of Owen’s hands, but the damage was already done. “This blouse was part of a three-hundred-dollar matching set!”

“So sue me,” Owen retorted. “If we both somehow manage to get off this island alive then I’ll give them both back to you so you can still fix it up.”

“Never mind,” Claire snorted as she tied her now-ruined blouse around her waist once again. “Okay, now what?”

“I don’t know, actually,” Owen admitted. “I didn’t think we’d be able to get this far. Hang on, let me scope out the place before we do anything else.” But as Owen moved closer to the door of the hut that had served as their cell, he heard the loud and distinctive chittering of dozens of compys running past their hut and through the rest of the cartel’s camp. “Okay, now that is really not good,” Owen said as he watched the packs of compys run past him through the gaps in the planking.

“Why? What’s going on?” Claire asked him.

“If the compys are running around in droves like this, then a bigger predator must be running them out of town,” Owen replied. “Come on, let’s get out of here before that big predator makes it way to here.” Owen kicked open the door with a well-placed boot hell to the hinges, and he and Claire made their way out of the hut where the cartel had kept them and ran alongside the compys.


	15. Chaos

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All hell breaks loose as dinosaurs find their way into the cartel's camp.

“What the hell is going on in here!?” La Jefe asked as she opened the door to her quarters. A pair of guards had made their way to her place after the loud chittering of the _Compsognathus_ packs had woken Chiquita up. “Why the hell are these lizards running through the camp?” she asked the guards.

“We don’t know, _jefe_ ,” one of the guards replied.

“And this is the first time we’ve seen these small chicken lizards acting like this,” the other guard added. “Sure, one or two or even three of them have passed through the camp once or twice, but never like this. There is like, an entire herd of them running through right now! It’s just so strange, _jefe_ , you know.”

“Well, I don’t care how strange it is,” Chiquita retorted. “Make sure that these damned creatures don’t damage the product in the warehouse! I’ve already got hell to pay for from Joey after those two Jurassic World gringos managed to make it into the camp. And someone check on the gringos! Make sure they’re not using these lizards to escape!”

“Si, _jefe_ ,” the second guard replied, and he nodded his head and turned around at the spot to carry out his orders. “And what are you waiting for?” Chiquita demanded of the first guard. “Get the lizard chickens out of here!”

“Si, _jefe_ ,” the guard replied, but before he could start dealing with the compys, they were now replaced by slightly larger dinosaurs the size of fully grown turkeys. These dinosaurs were covered in brown fluffy downy feathers with blue, white and red striations down their flanks and arms. Their shrill cries echoed through the night as they ran in the same direction as the compys. “What the fuck!?” Chiquita cried out. “Where the hell are all these things coming from?”

But even as the final turkey-sized dinosaur ran past them, both Chiquita and the remaining guard felt the ground shaking underneath their feet, and the shaking got stronger and stronger until it suddenly and mysteriously stopped. Chiquita looked at the direction to which the dinosaurs were running, and it was there that she saw the guard staring wide-eyed at something behind and above her. Chiquita slowly turned around to look behind her, and when she saw what it was that was standing behind her, she gasped audibly.

A very big dinosaur, quite possibly the biggest one that Chiquita had ever seen on this island, bigger than even the long-necked dinosaurs, was standing right in front of her. The dinosaur had a long and narrow snout like that of a crocodile, a pair of sickly green eyes with cat-like slit irises, and a massive red sail with green spots on its back. The dinosaur stood still as it cocked its head to look back at Chiquita. Behind her, she heard the guard run away as fast as his legs could take him, and she knew that she should have done the same thing, but now she was locked in a staring contest with this massive dinosaur, and she feared that any move to run away on her part would result in her getting eaten.

So La Jefe did the only thing that she knew would break the standoff: she drew the Colt M1911 pistol from her shoulder holster and fired three shots at the dinosaur’s head, which recoiled back from the impact of the tiny lead rounds on its thick skull and snout. “How do you like that!” La Jefe shouted at the dinosaur with a laugh. Those would turn out to be her final words.

The _Spinosaurus_ suddenly lunged its head forward and bit down on La Jefe’s extended right arm. There was a sickening sound of bones breaking and flesh and tendons tearing, and then the spinosaur pulled away the entirety of La Jefe’s arm away from the rest of her body. La Jefe had barely enough time to register the attack on her because it had happened so fast, and by the time that she did finally react, it was too late; the damage had already been done. La Jefe looked down at the ragged stump that had once been her right arm, and she screamed and finally began to run away from the spinosaur. The _Spinosaurus_ tossed back its head to swallow the arm, gun and all, and then it swung its snout and knocked down the fleeing La Jefe and finished her off in one more bite.

The cartel camp soon descended into total chaos as the _Spinosaurus_ ventured deeper into their camp. The rest of the guards who weren’t already busy trying to herd the compys and the other dinosaurs away from their camp simply didn’t know how to deal with this particular situation, so they did the only thing that they knew could save them: they opened fire at the spinosaur with their guns and rifles. This tactic, while it may have worked against a rival cartel or government and police forces, was simply no match against a dinosaur that was seemingly impregnable and invulnerable to their bullets. In fact, the firestorm that the cartel had unleashed seemed to anger the spinosaur even more, and it proceeded to wreak even more havoc in the camp as it rampaged against the enemies trying to hurt it.

In the midst of all this, two people were taking advantage of the chaos being caused by the rampaging _Spinosaurus_ and the other dinosaurs running through the cartel camp to escape. However, this proved to be easier said than done as the sheer number of dinosaurs running through the cartel camp had showed to Owen Grady and Claire Dearing just how dangerous it was to be in the middle of Isla Sorna.

“Watch out for the velociraptors!” Owen shouted.

“Raptors!? Where?” Claire asked. Owen pulled her back into the cover of a stack of empty oil barrels as the pack of brown turkey-sized theropods ran past them. “Those are raptors!?” she asked incredulously.

“Yep,” Owen nodded. “The biologically accurate velociraptors, at that. Yet another species left off of both lists by InGen.”

“Damn it,” Claire muttered. “Where the hell are we supposed to go now? Not back to the forest, I hope?”

“No, most definitely not,” Owen said. “You saw how all these animals came out of the forest because of the spino. Our best bet is to stay inside the camp even though I don’t like that in the slightest. We need to get to someplace where the spino can’t get to us easily.” Owen scoped out the place and finally found a place that to him looked exactly like what they needed. “Over here. Follow me!” he said.

* * *

“Stay here, and don’t let anyone else inside unless it’s me!” The young cartel guard silently nodded his head. As he watched the rest of the guards rushing to engage the huge rampaging dinosaur that was practically destroying their camp, he was silently glad that he was the one who had been ordered to stay behind. Anything other than fighting, or trying to fight, that massive dinosaur was preferable to him, to be honest. He didn’t join the Mitu Cartel for this. He joined the cartel because his older brother had told him that it was the easiest way to get out of their tiny mountain village just outside Bogota, and also because the cartel was an easy source of income.

When the guard had come down to the camp in Isla Sorna, he had his doubts about the security of the place, seeing that it had been placed right in the middle of one of the only two islands in the world where dinosaurs roamed free. The commander of the cartel guards had seen the question forming in the young guard’s mind, and so he immediately walked over to him and told him to keep his thoughts to himself lest he become dinosaur food. Since the camp hadn’t been attacked the whole time that he had been here, the young guard thought no more of it. Until now.

Now this was the nightmare scenario for almost everyone in the camp, even more so for the young guard. Other people would say that getting attacked by the smaller dinosaurs like the velociraptors would be even scarier than this, but the large dinosaurs like the _Tyrannosaurus rex_ and this, whatever this was, were terrifyingly fascinating in their own right. Still, the thought of being chased by one of those things and then getting swallowed up was not a very good thought at all.

“Hey, buddy, do you mind if we stay in there with you?” a voice suddenly called out in the darkness. The young guard immediately brought his new weapon up to his shoulder and pointed it forward. He had replaced the gun that had been issued to him with the rifle that had been taken from the American gringo. It looked fancy, something that rich people would use to hunt deer or other wild animals. And it didn’t really occur to him that this rifle might not work the same way as the other guns that the cartel used.

But the young guard wouldn’t even have a chance to find this out as a solid fist suddenly appeared out of nowhere and struck him in the jaw. He was unconscious before he had even hit the ground. “I’ll take that,” Owen Grady said, grabbing his Marlin Model 1895 lever-action from the guard’s hands. He then winced as he shook the pins and needles emanating from his hand where his fist had met the guard’s bony jaw. “Damn, that dude had a rock-hard face!” he said through gritted teeth. “Come on, let’s get this poor bastard in here,” he said to Claire Dearing, who was right behind him. “You grab his feet, I’ll get his arms.” Neither of them would wish getting eaten by a dinosaur on anyone, even their worst enemies (bar a few exceptions), which was why they made the decision to hide the unconscious guard inside the terminal where he wouldn’t get eaten or scavenged by dinosaurs so easily.

They dragged the unconscious guard into a structure that appeared to have once been a small airport terminal but was now filled with stacks of white powder wrapped into bricks with plastic and Cling-Wrap. “Holy crap, look how much cocaine and blow is in here,” Claire said as she and Owen carried the guard to behind a stack of coke bricks. “I wonder how much all of this is worth?”

“Why, are you thinking of bringing some back with you back home?” Owen asked.

“I mean, I’m certainly tempted,” Claire admitted. “Only a little bit, though,” she added a little hastily.

The ground began shaking once again from the footsteps of the _Spinosaurus_ , and Owen could see through the terminal’s windows that the dinosaur was headed straight for them. “Come on!” he said as he readied his rifle. “Doesn’t this guy ever get tired of chasing us across the whole goddamn island!?”

The two of them quickly ducked behind more bricks of cocaine, with Owen keeping his rifle ready in case the spinosaur got a little too nosy inside the terminal. None of them dared speak in fear of attracting the spino’s attention, but they were sure that they were both thinking the same thing: _go away, go away, go away!_

The _Spinosaurus_ looked down at the strange squat structure in front of it that was giving off a strong and strange odor that was almost overwhelming its sense of smell. But despite that strong chemical smell though, it could still distinguish the scent of the prey that it had smelled back in the place where the sawfish lived. And the spinosaur was determined to get at that prey, no matter how hard or how long it took. If only it could find a way inside and sniff out its prey even further…

Suddenly, the spinosaur reeled back and roared as something struck its left flank and exploded. The cartel had used the most powerful weapon in its arsenal, a rocket-propelled grenade, against the marauding dinosaur as a last resort. The spinosaur roared at the remaining cartel guards and turned to pursue them, which was exactly what the guards wanted, but even though the spino had appeared invulnerable to almost anything that man could throw at it, it was still a beast, and it began limping as the RPG had exploded near its hip joint.

“Keep firing!” the commander of the guards shouted. “Make sure that its attention is on us and us alone! Make sure that it doesn’t get to the product and damage it!”

The rest of the surviving guards fired their weapons at the spinosaur. At the same time they began moving away from their camp, towards the forest at the other side of the airstrip on which they had built their camp. They did this, knowing that most if not all of them would probably not survive the night in the jungle, but their loyalty to the cartel trumped everything else, even their common sense and sense of self-preservation. And their orders were to protect the product at all costs. It didn’t matter if it was the police, a rival cartel, or even a dinosaur trying to get at the drugs; the product must be protected at all costs.

Meanwhile, the _Spinosaurus_ let out a mighty bellow, and it followed the surviving cartel guards into the jungle of Isla Sorna.


	16. Flight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A plane smuggling drugs from Colombia to the US by way of Isla Sorna arrives to witness the aftermath of the _Spinosaurus_ ' attack on the camp.

Smuggling drugs across international borders by plane had been a viable tactic for the drug cartels since the early seventies. At this point in time, it was a time-honored tradition. Of course, with the United States beefing up its security with its land border with Mexico, flying drugs into America itself was all but impossible, although they had just shifted the plan to unloading the drugs in Mexico or Central America and then transporting it over the border by land even though there was a real rivalry between the Mexican and Colombian cartels. Flying across Central America was either very easy or very difficult, depending on a number of factors such as how much US aid a given nation needed or how far a sitting or new administration wanted to distance themselves from the United States. Almost all of Central America was looking to receive their share of American aid at the moment so they were all cooperating with the DEA to monitor their airspace and territorial waters for potential drug runners trying to smuggle their product in the air or on the water.

The Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner flying across the nighttime Pacific Ocean was one of those aforementioned drug runners. It had originally plied its trade in the United States as a regional airliner before finding itself all the way down in Panama to join the fleet of a low-cost carrier startup called Aeropanama. Aeropanama had gone under just a few months ago, its assets sold off to the highest bidder. One of those bidders happened to be the Mitu Cartel, and the cartel flew the Metroliner down to one of their secret airstrips in Colombia and immediately loaded it with their latest product to satisfy the demand from the north. Such was their haste to put the Metroliner in their service immediately that the cartel hadn’t even removed the seats in the plane to make it carry much more cargo than it could at the moment.

There were three people on the Metroliner tonight. Two were the crew flying the plane itself while the third one was one of the many bosses in charge of the day-to-day operations of the Mitu Cartel. Both the pilot and copilot were Panamanian nationals who had previously worked for Aeropanama before the company’s demise and were now made to work for the cartels because they both needed the money and if they refused, the cartels would kill them. Also, they were also the only people who had experience in the Metroliner which the cartel could reach out to without calling undue attention to themselves.

Jose Peralta, known both as _El Jefe_ and as “Joey” in the Mitu Cartel, was on this flight from Colombia to Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula both to make sure that the Panamanian pilots actually do their job and not surrender the plane or the product to the authorities, and also to check up on Chiquita in their camp on Isla Sorna. It was part of her training to become a part of the Mitu Cartel’s upper echelons, and while Chiquita had done well so far running the camp in Isla Sorna, the fact that two gringos managed to make it all the way to the cliff above the camp before they were stopped by the guards had convinced Peralta had made the right decision to go on this flight to Sorna. One of the problems that the Peralta had with Chiquita was the fact that she was unable to make the truly big decisions that could make or break a cartel. Chiquita always needed to be told what to do by someone more senior than her. And indecision was more or less fatal for anyone in the drug cartels.

“Hey, _jefe_ ,” Diego Valdez, former captain of Aeropanama and now drug runner for the Mitu Cartel, called out to Peralta. “We’re almost at the island. You might want to buckle up. Or not, if you don’t want to. That’s cool, too,” he added when he saw that Peralta was busy inspecting their cargo. Bricks of cocaine powder had been stacked up on the seats of the Metroliner and in the spaces between the seats, leaving only the central aisle of the plane clear for anyone to walk down on. Peralta was checking whether the product had shifted when Valdez had called out to him, and he didn’t appear to have heard what Peralta had said. “Armando, go call the guys below and tell them to light up the runway because we’re coming in,” he instructed his copilot.

“Okay, Diego,” Armando Ochoa, Valdez’s copilot, replied. He checked the radio to make sure that he was tuned to the right frequency, and then he called out, “Sorna, this is Papa November Mike coming in hot. Light up the runway for us, will you?” Ochoa’s call was met by a strange silence, strange because it was the first time that Sorna did not reply to them immediately. But he also knew that the range of the radios on Sorna were not as far as that of the radio on the Metroliner so he didn’t think much of it at the moment. A few minutes later, he called out again, “Sorna, this is Papa November Mike. Light up the runway.” Because both the cartel and their drug runners wanted as much as possible not to get caught, smugglers’ airstrips were often not lit up until a drug runner was in range. This made sure that civilian pilots and planes who weren’t supposed to see the airstrips didn’t see them or mistake them for actual strips.

“Still nothing, Diego,” Ochoa told Valdez after his third failed attempt to make contact with the camp on Sorna.

“What’s going on here, huh?” Peralta asked as he stuck his head into the cockpit. “Where’s the runway?”

“That’s the thing, boss,” Valdez replied. “Nobody’s talking to us from down there.”

“Give me the mike,” Peralta commanded. Valdez took off his headset and handed it over to Peralta. Peralta wiped off some of the sweat that had clung to the headphones before slipping it on. “Hey, Sorna,” he said.

“Wait, I gotta turn on the microphone first,” Valdez said, and he pushed the transmit button on his control yoke. “Now go ahead, boss.”

“Hey, Sorna, this is Peralta,” Peralta repeated. He had gained enough notoriety with the Colombian authorities that he could afford to use his real name in unsecured communications instead of relying on nicknames like “El Jefe”. “You better get those lights up pronto or else there will be hell to pay when we finally get down there.” But not even his veiled threat had managed to elicit a response from the people on Sorna. “Goddamn it,” Peralta said as he tossed the headphones back to Valdez. “Someone must have fallen asleep down there. Or the cops could have already taken down the whole base because of those damned gringos! _Mierda!_ Valdez, do we have enough fuel to make it back to San Jose?”

“Unfortunately not, boss,” Valdez replied. “We only took on enough fuel for a one-way trip. We’ve always done our refueling on the island before. If we turn back now, we’re only going to crash into the sea. We won’t even make it to Matanceros on our fumes.” Valdez was referring to Isla Matanceros, another island in Los Cinco Muertes in which the Mitu Cartel had also established a base and airstrip.

“All right, if the cops had captured the base then they wouldn’t have kept quiet while we were calling for them,” Peralta reasoned. “They would have told us to land so they can arrest us all as well. But no, someone should have been on the radio as well so that they can wake up the guy who’s supposed to respond. Goddamn it!” Peralta turned to Valdez once again and asked, “Can you land this thing without lights?”

“Are you kidding me, boss? I can land this thing blindfolded,” Valdez replied with a cocky grin. “Besides, Armando and I already got eyes on the runway anyway. It won’t be a greaser, that’s for sure, but just strap in and don’t throw up on me, okay, boss? I ain’t never had nobody throw up on me on any of my flights yet.”

Peralta grunted, but as he was not a pilot, he complied with Valdez’s commands and sat down in the first seat in the cabin. It was the only seat not loaded with a stack of cocaine bricks and the seat that Peralta had occupied when the Metroliner had taken off from the Mitu Cartel’s secret airstrip near the Colombian-Panamanian border. Peralta watched as the Panamanian pilots went through their landing checklist and spoke in terms and jargon that Peralta had little if any understanding of. But he did know that when pilots talked about things like flaps and slats and landing gear, the plane was about to land.

The Metroliner landed hard on the gravel and tarmac surface of the Sorna runway as smoothly as it could under the circumstances, and the pilots then applied reverse thrust and brakes to slow the plane down even further. Finally the Metroliner came to a stop in the middle of the runway, and then Valdez fed a little power to the engines to get the plane moving forward once again and he and Ochoa could “drive” the plane towards the airstrip’s refueling station.

“Hey, this is strange,” Diego Valdez said as he parked the plane beside the strip’s fuel pump. “It’s quiet here.”

“Yeah, where the hell is everybody?” Armando Ochoa added. Usually there would already be a team of handlers guiding the plane towards the fuel pump, but this night it was the pilots themselves who had to do it. “Don’t tell me everyone fell asleep at the same time tonight,” he quipped.

“No, something is definitely wrong here,” Jose Peralta said. “You two stay here and refuel the plane. I’ll check out the camp. And no funny business, or else I will leave you here to feed the dinosaurs.” Peralta then drew his Colt M1911A1 pistol from his shoulder holster, checked that there was a round in the chamber, and cocked the pistol. He opened the Metroliner’s door and lowered the integral staircase to the ground so he could get down. He saw the propellers of the Metroliner’s engines slowing to a halt as the pilots shut them down for the refueling operation, and then Peralta walked around the nose of the plane and walked towards the camp.

It didn’t take long before Peralta stumbled upon his first clue as to what could have happened to the people in the camp. He saw a green misshapen lump on the path leading to the camp, a lump that seemed to be alive and moving. As Peralta moved towards the lump, the green shapes revealed themselves to be tiny dinosaurs, who scattered and ran away chittering. It was only after the dinosaurs had gone that Peralta saw what it was that they were feasting on. “ _Madre de Dios!_ ” he cried out. It was Velez, one of the older and more experienced foot soldiers of the cartel. “What the hell happened to you, man?” Peralta asked even though he knew that there was no chance of Velez or anyone else replying to his question.

“Chiquita!” Peralta called out, hoping that at least she would be able to explain what happened to the camp. “Chiquita, where the hell are you?” But even as he searched for Chiquita, Peralta could be sure of one thing that most certainly did not happen here: this was not the work of government forces or even a rival cartel. For one, there was no sign of life in the camp, other than those green dinosaurs feeding on Velez’s body. Secondly, of the brief glance of Velez that Peralta had gotten, he could see that the man didn’t die of a gunshot. In fact, it appeared as if Velez had been crushed by something huge, and the tiny dinosaurs had descended upon his body later.

Peralta made his way deeper into the camp, looking for Chiquita’s quarters, and he kept his Colt pistol in front of him all the time. However, before he could get to her hut, he saw something that finally confirmed his deepest and darkest fears about what happened to the camp. On the ground near the camp barracks, Peralta found a leather shoulder holster, similar to the one Peralta had on him now, lying in the middle of a patch of blood and gristle. He lifted up the holster and saw Chiquita’s initials embossed on the flap. “Holy Mother of God!” he exclaimed once again. And then, as if in response, something roared in the woods surrounding the camp. It was a deep and primeval roar, a roar that would have struck fear in the hearts of animals who would have been alive one hundred million years ago, let alone creatures living in the present day.

Jose Peralta still had no idea as to what could have happened in the camp or what had attacked them and killed at least both Chiquita and Velez. But he did know one thing: he had to get off this goddamned island now.

Diego Valdez and Armando Ochoa were returning the fuel hose to the pumping station when Peralta ran back to their plane. As he stooped down with hands on his knees to catch his breath, Valdez asked him, “What’s the situation, boss? What happened to the camp? What happened to the others?”

“There are no more others, Valdez,” Peralta replied tersely. It was taking him quite some time to catch his breath as he was overweight and he hadn’t had to run this far this long since ever.

“What!?” Ochoa asked disbelievingly. “Are you kidding me? What happened to them? Did the dinosaurs eat them or what?”

“Yes, that could very well be what happened to them,” Peralta replied. “And if you two don’t get a move on, we could very well be next on the menu. Is the plane ready?”

“ _Si, jefe_ ,” Valdez replied.

“Good. Now let’s get going.”

“Wait! What about the ground inspection?” Ochoa asked.

“No! We don’t have any more fucking time for any fucking ground inspections!” Peralta shouted. “We are going to get off this fucking island now! Or would you like to stay behind and become dinosaur food?”

“No, of course not, boss,” Ochoa replied hastily, and he immediately ran for the door and got into the Metroliner. Valdez followed him into the cockpit and then Peralta, who as the last person to board the plane had the responsibility for bringing up the integral staircase and securing it before closing and locking the door. Once he had done that, Peralta observed the pilots from just outside the cockpit as there was simply no room for him inside the cockpit, and he saw them running through their pre-flight checklist. “Forget the checklist!” Peralta thundered. “Let’s fucking go! Let’s fucking take off!”

“Boss, if we don’t do the checklist, we’re not going to get off the island anyway!” Valdez shouted back. He knew very well that Peralta could have shot him right then and there for answering back at him, but both men also knew that if Peralta killed Valdez right here, neither Ochoa nor Peralta would have been able to get the plane off the ground. And there were some things that a pilot simply could not afford to not do even for the sake of getting off this damned island faster, and one of those things was the pre-flight checklist. And Peralta for his part did shut up and let the pilots do their thing. He had seen other drug runners pay for their limbs and their lives by neglecting the pre-flight checklist to get airborne quicker. The results were not pretty to say the least.

Valdez and Ochoa had to go through the checklist all over again because Peralta’s shouting had distracted them, making sure that they were stuck on Isla Sorna for a few more vital minutes. Eventually though, they were able to tick off the final item on their checklist, and Peralta finally dared to speak. “Now can we fly away from this godforsaken hellhole of an island?” he asked.

“Yes, boss,” Valdez replied. “As soon as we get the engines started.”

“Then what the hell are you waiting for? Start them up!” Peralta demanded.

“Yes, boss, we’re on it,” Ochoa replied in a tense and clipped tone.

“Are you sure that everything is now working?” Peralta asked.

“Yes, boss, we’re sure,” Ochoa replied.”

“Good,” Peralta muttered. “Now fly us out of here. I don’t want to stay on this godforsaken island for one second longer.”

“Roger that, boss,” Valdez said.

It was barely noticeable at first, and everyone on board the Metroliner was too preoccupied with getting the plane back in the air to even feel the vibration of the earth. The first time that any of them noted that something was amiss was when Peralta happened to glance at one of the water bottles in the cockpit and saw the water inside shaking very slightly. The water shook once again with stronger ripples, and this time Peralta thought that he could feel the plane shaking as well. “Did you feel that?” he asked.

“Feel what?” Valdez asked in reply. He was looking down at his instruments, trying to see if there was one thing that he or Ochoa had missed in their pre-flight checklist. “Maybe it’s just the engines starting up, boss.”

“I haven’t started them up yet, Diego,” Ochoa said.

Then came yet another vibration, and this time all three of them felt it. “ _Hijo de puta!_ ” Ochoa exclaimed. “What the hell was that!?”

“I think you better get those engines started, Armando,” Valdez suggested to him.

“I think you’re right,” Ochoa replied, and his hands moved quickly to the engine start levers. He started on the left engine, which coughed and turned over once or twice before its propeller finally began to spin at a prodigious rate even though the throttles were still on idle. Ochoa then made to turn on the right engine. It coughed and spluttered and stuttered, and for a brief moment it looked like one of them would have had to get out and manually crank the engine and propeller themselves but thankfully it finally caught and sputtered to life. None of them had wanted to get out of the relative safety of the Metroliner since the vibrations were rapidly coming and intensifying, and then just after the second engine finally came to life, the vibrations stopped. All three of them hoped that that was the last surprise that the island of Sorna would throw at them, but all three of them could feel in their gut that this island still had one more surprise up its sleeve.

“Look!” Peralta said, pointing at something over at the far end of the runway. It was right at the edge of the range of their landing lights, but they all could still discern at least a few details about it. It was a massive creature at least the size of a three-story building, and its head was slim and sleek like that of an alligator or crocodile, and it had a massive red sail with green and gray spots on its back. Peralta had never seen anything like it before in his life, but then he remembered that he had indeed seen a creature like it before, but it was in one of his nephew’s books.

It was a goddamn _Spinosaurus_.

The _Spinosaurus_ stared at the Metroliner. They could see the animal’s jaws working open and closed. Its big and powerful forearms clawed lightly at the air as the spinosaur pondered the big purring and shiny object that had suddenly appeared in its newly acquired territory. Suddenly the dinosaur roared, a sound that was not meant to be heard by human ears without reducing them to cowering shells of themselves, and then it began to move towards them.

“Get us out of here, now!” Peralta shouted.

“Give me full power on both engines!” Valdez ordered, and Ochoa shoved the engine throttles to their stops. The plane buzzed with power as the engines produced more thrust, but they were still barely moving, and the spinosaur was now closing on them at a very brisk pace.

“Fifty knots,” Ochoa announced as the Metroliner’s speedometer finally came alive. “Sixty knots. Seventy knots. Eighty. Come on, you bastard! Must go faster!”

“What the hell is going on here?” Peralta asked. “Why are we moving so slow?”

“I don’t know, boss!” Valdez replied. “It’s like we gained a few hundred extra pounds! Did you bring some product back with you, boss?”

“Of course not, you idiot!” Peralta shot back. “Do you think I had enough time to go to the warehouse and grab some more drugs?”

“Maybe we should toss a few bricks to lighten us?”

“No!” Peralta shouted. “If you so much as touch one brick of the product on this plane, I will kill you myself!”

“No time for that, Joey,” Valdez said. “Get yourself strapped in!”

“One-ten knots!” Ochoa shouted. “V-1!”

The spinosaur roared as it picked up speed. It was getting ever closer to the Metroliner, eating up the distance between it and the plane at an alarming rate. The creature bellowed into the night as it came even closer.

“One-twenty knots! Come on!” Ochoa shouted.

“Rotate!” Valdez hauled back on the control yoke with all his strength, and beside him Ochoa did the same. The nose of the Metroliner lifted high into the air, but the wheels of the main landing gear still remained stuck on the ground. Eventually though, the earth finally released its grip on the Metroliner, and the passenger plane turned drug runner finally lifted off of the runway.

But they were still not higher than the spinosaur.

“Climb, you son of a bitch!” Valdez shouted at the plane. The altimeter ticked off their rate of climb painfully slowly. The Metroliner finally gained enough altitude to clear both the spinosaur’s head and sail just in time before the plane collided with either. The plane rocked as they felt the spinosaur turn its head around and try to catch the plane by its tail. The spinosaurs almost managed to catch them by the horizontal stabilizer, and the subsequent upset in balance almost caused them to lose their precious altitude.

“Come on, Diego, keep it in the air!” Ochoa told Valdez.

“I’m trying! I’m trying! What do you think I’m trying to do here, huh?” Valdez shot back.

And then they were finally flying level once again, and Valdez immediately lifted the nose to gain more altitude. Behind them, the spinosaur roared at the bizarre metal invader that had entered its territory suddenly and left it so quickly after. The _Spinosaurus_ stared up at the night sky before unleashing one final bellow and slipping back into the trees beyond the airstrip.

“ _Madre de Dios!_ ” Ochoa said. “Let us never stop over on that island again!” Ochoa said.

“I agree, Armando,” Valdez replied.

“My God,” Peralta muttered. “What am I going to tell the rest of the _jefes_? Dear God in heaven! You two, just keep flying for the Baja, okay?”

“ _Si, si, si_ ,” the pilots muttered as they turned the aircraft to the north towards the Baja California Peninsula and back to human civilization.

“My God, that was intense,” Peralta muttered, wiping the sweat off of his brow. “I’m going to check on the product, see if any of them got shifted by what happened. Keep us flying and don’t turn back. And remember, no funny business.”

“ _Si, si_ ,” Valdez waved off, wishing that Peralta would just get on with what he wanted to do so he and Ochoa could concentrate on flying the plane.

Peralta walked down the one and only aisle in the Metroliner’s cabin. The aisle was narrow, big enough to let only one person walk through, and Peralta’s gut was a little bit wider than the average person, so it took him some time to walk down the aisle checking the product on the seats and in between. One problem about rushing new drug runners into service was the fact that sometimes, the mechanics would forget to do things like remove the seats in this Metroliner so they could increase its cargo capacity tenfold. Peralta made a mental note to have the seats removed as soon as they got back to their base in Colombia.

Peralta walked down the aisle, checking that none of the product had broken open and spilled out during the encounter with the dinosaur. Everything was still intact and where they were supposed to be, thank God. But then Peralta noticed something wrong with the rear cargo door of the Metroliner. In their haste to get off of the island, neither Peralta nor the pilots had been able to check if the cargo door was secure, but now the drug cartel boss noticed that the cabin cargo door was slightly ajar and not securely locked down. The door was ajar, not fully open but also noticeably not locked. Peralta reached out to pull open the door…

…and saw only stacks upon stacks of bricks of coke. Peralta glanced at the bricks to make sure that they were all packed tightly together, and then he stepped away from the cargo hold and locked the door. Maybe the door had been unlocked when the dinosaur had tried to bite their tail off. Peralta shrugged and was about to think no more of the opened door when he suddenly felt the cold steel of a gun barrel resting on the back of his neck. “ _Mierda_ ,” he muttered softly to himself.


	17. Hijack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The cartel plane gets two very unexpected passengers.

“Everything okay back there, Joey?” Diego Valdez asked as he heard footsteps returning to the cockpit. There was no reply from Jose Peralta; instead, the man was suddenly thrown into the cockpit as much as his fat belly would let him, and the cartel general struck the cockpit’s central console with a dull thud. Both Valdez and his copilot Armando Ochoa turned around to see who or what had thrown Peralta into the cockpit and saw two people, a man and a woman, standing inside the passenger cabin just beyond the cockpit door. Both of them looked like they were gringos, and that they had been through hell and back. The man looked like a military type and was now pointing a big hunting rifle at the two pilots while the woman, who was wearing a purple tank top and a skirt that had once been white but was now stained brown, green, and red, was holding Peralta’s big Colt pistol in her hands. “What the hell!” Valdez shouted, and he and Ochoa immediately raised their hands in surrender.

“Keep those hands on the controls, gentlemen,” Owen Grady commanded the two pilots in Spanish. “We don’t want to crash right back into Sorna just after we’ve all gotten away from it, do we?”

“Look, man, we know nothing, okay?” Valdez said as he put his hands back on the controls. “We only know where we’re supposed to take the drugs, and that’s to Baja California!”

“You can’t hold us up like this!” Peralta added. “We have rights!”

“Okay, amigos, first things first,” Owen said, switching to English. “One, no talking unless I tell you to talk. Second, I’m not a cop, a fed, or even from another cartel, and neither is she. We’re from InGen, okay? We’re from the other island, Nublar. We had to hide in your plane because the same dinosaur that chased you off of this island was also chasing us.”

“Oh, so we’re partners now, huh?” Claire Dearing asked Owen in a hushed tone, speaking up for the first time since she and Owen revealed their presence to Peralta and the others.

“What am I supposed to call you then?” Owen asked her back. “You’re not my boss, at least not anymore, and you’re also not my girlfriend, so what am I supposed to call you?”

“So you _are_ from Jurassic World!” Peralta said. “But what the hell are you doing on Sorna, on this other island?”

“Hey! Did I tell you that you can open your mouth?” Owen said to Peralta, putting the muzzle of his Marlin rifle into the back of the Colombian’s neck. “And why would you be surprised that people from Jurassic World are on Sorna? Nublar is practically next door! In fact, I should be asking the same question to you guys! What are you three doing here in Sorna?”

“We use a strip here,” Valdez replied. “We use it to refuel and to store up our product.”

“Shut the fuck up, Valdez!” Peralta shouted in Spanish.

“All right, this is what we’re going to do, boys,” Owen said. “You’re going to turn this plane right back to Sorna. You, pilot, you’re going to use your left hand to set the autopilot to heading 210. And keep your right hand right where I can see it.”

Using his left hand to adjust the autopilot heading put Valdez’s body in an awkward position, which would make it difficult for him to do something with the plane’s controls if he actually decided to do it. Beside him, Ochoa kept his own hands on the control yoke but didn’t move the yoke itself as he had been told to stay still and also because he didn’t know what to do in this particular situation. “All right, now still using your left hand, turn on the autopilot,” Owen commanded. “And no trickery. I know how this thing works, and I can fly it myself if I have to.”

“Can you really fly this thing?” Claire asked Owen once again, but Owen shook his head and put a finger to his lips, which Claire took to mean that he didn’t know and that she should shut up before the drug runners found out. But Valdez still complied with Owen’s commands, and as he felt the slight shift of gravity from the plane turning, Owen grabbed hold of the cockpit doorway’s frame to secure himself, and Claire immediately followed suit.

“There’s another airstrip at the southeastern corner of the island,” Owen said. “It’s nowhere near any animals’ territory so we should be safe to land there.”

“Owen, why are we going back to the island?” Claire asked him.

“I’m going to do the thing that got us here in the first place,” he replied. “Look, I don’t know what it is that Hoskins, Wu and Pardew cooked up between themselves but I do know that there _are_ a bunch of people that crashed on Sorna. Pardew and his men may have just used them, and us, as cover to get on this island but those people are possibly still out there. Sure, maybe they got eaten by dinosaurs in the end, but until we know that for sure, we cannot be certain. And when I got a look in their plane, they looked like they were well-prepared for going to Sorna, so maybe they’re still out there waiting for rescue to finally come. Anyway, there’s an animal tracking center in the southeast part of Sorna. It’s very isolated, meaning that there should be no animals near it at all. That tracking center should still be up and running. I know the guys there; we worked together for some time. I have to talk to them, even if they are in on Wu and Pardew’s harvesting program shit. And then when we find out where the survivors are, we’re going to call Katsouranis and tell him that the deal has changed.”

“What if Katsouranis and/or Henry don’t agree to the deal being changed?” Claire asked. “What if they decide that they’d be better off just killing us?”

“So they do,” Owen replied. “I thought about that possibility, Dearing. I told Barry about who was taking us, where and why, the whole nine yards. Barry has experience with the French DGSE; I know he has contacts in the DGSE and I’m sure he and they have at least a faint but good idea of what Pardew Protection could be doing on Sorna. I also told Barry that if he sees the _Esfahan_ ship but not us within 24 hours of each other then he is to spill the beans on the whole thing.”

“Grady, are you sure that Barry can do all that?” Claire asked. “What if InGen or Pardew try to silence him as well?”

“Look, don’t worry about it. Barry used to be in the Foreign Legion. That’s basically being the ultimate of the ultimates. They’ll show him respect if they have to go against him. Heck, they might even warn Barry that they’re coming so he can plot his escape. Barry’s a slippery son of a gun. If we’re forcibly ‘disappeared’ then Barry will know and he’ll know to disappear too.”

“And what about these guys?” Claire gestured at the three Hispanics in the cockpit.

“I really don’t want to kill them if I don’t have to,” Owen muttered so as not to be heard by the aforementioned Latinos, but the fat man who appeared to be the leader of their little group apparently still managed to hear what Owen had said because he suddenly piped up, “We’re not gonna say anything, _mano_! Just don’t kill us!”

“What?” the copilot, who appeared to be just in his early twenties, said. “Who’s going to get killed?”

“Hey! Everybody shut up!” Owen shouted. “Nobody here has to die tonight, okay? If everyone just shuts up and do what they’re supposed to do, we’re all gonna make it through this night alive. You get us to where we want to go and you’re free to go wherever you want, but only after you take us to where we need to be. Besides, I don’t really care that much about what you’re doing here. I don’t have the jurisdiction to arrest you three or anything. And that’s practically not my problem at all.”

“Hey, is that legit, man?” the copilot asked.

“Yeah, it’s legit,” Owen replied simply.

“I don’t like this, man,” Valdez said to Ochoa in Spanish as they continued to fly the Metroliner to the southern part of Isla Sorna. “I don’t like this at all.”

“Hey, hey! What are you two talking about, huh?” Owen asked. “I thought I said no talking!”

“I said that I don’t like what’s happening here, gringo!” Valdez repeated in English. “So we land on this island, and nobody’s waiting for us at the strip. We don’t what the hell happened to our guys so Joey here goes out and searches the camp and all he says is that the dinosaurs ate them all. And then when we tried to take off from the strip, this big-ass dinosaur try to eat us, and now you two gringos pop up and hijack us and tell us to get right back to this damn island! We are all fucking scared right now, okay, gringo? And not just because of you, but also because of Isla goddamned Sorna! The Indians said that this fucking island was cursed and now you’re telling me we have to go back to it? What the hell is wrong with you, man!?”

“Hey! We don’t want to go back to Sorna too, you know!” Owen said back. “We don’t want to go back but we have to because there are people out there who have just made it through a plane crash and now someone wants them found. And by God, I’m going to get off this island no matter what. And you three don’t have to stay for too long. You just land on the strip, we go out, and then you three are free to go back into the air and go to Baja California or wherever!”

“Hey, I see some lights down below us,” Ochoa said. “Over there,” he added as he pointed out of the cockpit.

“Hey, gringo, is that where we’re supposed to be?” Valdez asked Owen sarcastically. The former Navy SEAL looked at his watch and then outside the cockpit and he replied, “Yeah, that’s it.”

“Hey, is there anything that we need to know about this particular runway, eh?”

“Don’t bother with doing anything else here,” Owen replied. “Just land and take off. Oh, and don’t worry about this place. There are no dinosaurs here.”

Valdez and Ochoa shook their heads in resignation and then they circled the Metroliner around the strip both to check that there was no debris or other obstacles blocking the runway and to check the direction that the wind was blowing from. And then, as Ochoa turned the plane to line up with the runway, Valdez turned around and said, “You all better sit down now, man.”

“All right, big man, time to stand up,” Owen said as he grabbed the back of Peralta’s shirt and hauled him up to his feet. They walked over to the first empty seat in the aircraft, and Owen shoved Peralta into it. Owen then turned to Claire and said, “Go take the seat beside him.”

“Wait, it’s got all these bricks of coke and shit,” Claire said. She reached out and pushed over the stack of cocaine packed into the seat, and some of the plastic wrapping split open and spilled white powder all over the floor of the Metroliner’s cabin. “Hey! That’s ten thousand dollars you just tossed there, _chica_!” Peralta shouted.

“And your pilots said we should get seated,” Claire replied. Peralta shook his head and buckled his seatbelt. These _norteamericanos_ were crazy, he thought to himself. Claire buckled in soon after Peralta did, but things were a little more difficult for Owen. He was a tall guy and there was little if any legroom in the Metroliner even without all the bricks of coke lining the cabin. He thought about not buckling up at all because his knees were jammed almost up to his chest.

And then he finally heard the familiar whine of the plane’s landing gear being lowered, and Owen decided that he would fasten his seatbelt anyway. Soon after he had done that came the familiar sound of the landing gear striking the tarmac, and he braced himself for a few bumps and cracks during the landing, but the runway itself seemed smooth as a baby’s bottom. The Metroliner then slowed to a crawl before finally coming to a halt in the middle of the runway. With some difficulty, Owen squeezed himself out of his seat in the Metroliner. As he walked towards the door, he saw Claire looking out of the window on her side of the cabin. “Are you sure we’re at the right place?” she asked him. “This place doesn’t look like it’s been used for a very long time.”

“Trust me, we’re there,” Owen replied. He twisted open the door and lowered the integral stairs to the ground. Owen got off the plane first, and he scanned the area with his rifle in front of him to check that he was right and that there were indeed no dinosaurs at all in this area of the island. “Clear,” he called out, and Claire hopped out of the plane after him. Owen was about to close the door of the Metroliner when Peralta, still strapped into his seat, called out, “Hey, what about my gun, gringo?”

“Oh, yeah, right,” Claire said, and then she took out the Colt M1911A1 pistol from the waistband of her skirt, removed the magazine from the gun and pulled back the slide to remove the bullet in the chamber, and then she tossed the now-empty gun and the magazine into the plane just out of reach of the still-seated Peralta.

“Thanks for the ride, boys,” Owen called out, and then he stowed the Metroliner’s staircrase and closed the door. Now alone among themselves inside the Metroliner, Peralta called out to the pilots and said, “Not a word of this to anyone else, understood? We will only talk about what happened to our camp, not this little adventure right here, okay?”

“No arguments there, _jefe_ ,” Diego Valdez said as he revved up the engines to prepare the Metroliner for takeoff.

Owen and Claire watched silently as the Metroliner taxied to the end of the runway before rolling down the concrete strip and then taking off into the inky night sky. As the noise of the plane’s engines faded away into the distance and replaced by the usual jungle noises, Claire turned to Owen and asked, “Are you really, absolutely sure that this is the right place? Because, honestly, I’m looking at this place and I’m feeling that this hasn’t been touched since the old InGen abandoned Site B after Clarissa.” Hurricane Clarissa was the name of the storm that had led to the original InGen abandoning Site B, the place where they created and incubated the dinosaurs that were meant to become attractions for the original Jurassic Park.

“Look at the runway, Claire, okay?” Owen asked in reply. “It’s straight and smooth. If it hadn’t been in use since ’93 then you would expect cracks and potholes and grass growing on the strip. But there’s none of that. That means this strip is being used and maintained. And it looks very well maintained for a cheap jungle airstrip as well.”

“Okay, supposing this is the right place as you claim it is,” Claire said, “where in the world are your friends? And how are they supposed to know that we’re here in the first place?”

“They’ve got this whole place wired,” Owen replied. “They probably detected the plane coming in for a landing and now we’re setting off the motion detectors as we speak. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve already got someone on the way to check on who or what is setting off the alarms on their strip.”

As if on cue, the familiar yet out of place growl of an internal combustion engine roared out in the darkness. Vehicle headlights then pierced the jungle just beyond the airstrip, and Claire shook her head and said, “You have got to be kidding me.”


	18. Ride

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Owen and Claire hitch a ride with an old friend of Owen's.

A red and orange gas-powered jeep bearing the logo of the old Jurassic Park on its sides burst out of the jungle surrounding the dirt airstrip on which the drug runner airplane which Owen and Claire had practically hijacked earlier to take them here in the first place. The jeep drove up to them on a well-driven path that Claire had not noticed there before. A black man was behind the wheel of the jeep, and as he brought the jeep to a stop before the two new arrivals, Claire also noticed a deep scar on the jeep’s driver’s forehead. “Owen fucking Grady,” the driver said as he laid eyes on the newcomers. “What brings you to my little corner of Site B?”

“I’m going to require the services of your evil lair, Moe,” Owen replied. “That all right with you?”

“Sure, go ahead,” Moe said. “It’s not like we’re really busy in here or anything.” And then he finally noticed Claire properly for the first time, and he said to Owen, “I see you brought a lady friend here as well.”

“Aw, shit, where are my manners?” Owen asked rhetorically. “Claire Dearing, Morris Copeland. Morris Copeland, Claire Dearing.” As Claire and Copeland shook hands, Owen continued, “Claire here is the chief operations officer of Jurassic World. Or at least she used to be until one of Dr. Wu’s experiments finally escaped its paddock and ran apeshit all over the park. Now it’s safe to say that she’s getting real acquainted with the dirtier side of Jurassic World here on Site B.”

“Nice to meet you, Miss Dearing,” Copeland replied in a deep and smooth baritone. “Owen here has told me and the gang a lot about you.”

“I truly hope that all of it is good,” Claire said.

“Of course it is,” Copeland replied with an easy smile that nevertheless didn’t really tell Claire anything about what he truly meant. “Now hop in! I don’t want to stay out here longer than absolutely necessary.”

“I thought you said that there were no dinosaurs at all in this area,” Claire asked Owen.

“Of course there isn’t,” the former Navy SEAL replied. “Moe’s just pulling your chain, right? Isn’t that right, Moe?” he asked Copeland pointedly.

“Well, you can never be too sure,” Copeland replied.

“You wanna take shotgun or not?” Owen asked Claire.

“You go on ahead and take shotgun,” Claire replied. Owen nodded his head and lowered the front passenger seat of the jeep so that Claire could get into the back, and then he got into the passenger seat himself and Copeland immediately reversed the jeep and drove back the way it came.

“So, Mr. Copeland, how do you know Mr. Grady here?” Claire asked.

Copeland looked at Owen and grinned. “Man, she really is formal, isn’t she?” he asked him.

“You know me, Moe,” Owen replied. “I love myself a real lady.”

Copeland let out a short barking laugh before replying to Claire’s question. “All right, Miss Dearing. Here’s a little clue as to how I know Mr. Grady. My full name is Chief Radioman’s Mate First Class Morris Muhammad Copeland, United States Navy, retired. I fell in with this bastard here with the SEALs, and I’ve never been the same person since I met him.”

This time it was Owen’s turn to laugh. “Ain’t we all?” he added.

“What’s the nature of your work here for Masrani and for InGen?” Claire continued asking Copeland.

“I lead the division that tracks and monitors all the animals here in Site B,” Copeland replied. “Or at least legally speaking it’s a division, but it’s really just me and two other people who watch a bunch of TVs and monitors to make sure that the assets don’t get too close to the active Masrani facilities on the island.”

“So you’ve got cameras and motion detectors all over the island as well? You don’t have to go out and count the dinosaurs one by one as well?”

“No, and thankfully we don’t have to do that at all. We use a revamped, enhanced, updated and upgraded version of the original animal tracking software used by the original Jurassic Park. Of course, we still have to search for more animals than we believe we have so that we’re constantly updated if the dinosaurs have given birth or killed and/or eaten each other. But that’s not all that we happen to pick up during our duties,” Copeland continued. “We’d pick up all sorts of activity and whatnot going on here, and you will not believe what we’ve managed to pick up at our station very recently.”

“What kind of things are those exactly?”

“Oh, the usual bunch. InGen people mingling with their creations, drug runners, Centam hunters…”

“Centam hunters?” Claire repeated.

“Dinosaur hunters originating or operation from Central America,” Copeland replied, “commonly known as the area of land connecting North America and South America and stretching from Mexico to Panama and also includes islands in the Caribbean like Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and the like.”

“Dinosaur hunters?” Claire asked once again. “Why on earth would people want to hunt dinosaurs, and here of all places?”

“I don’t really know it myself, to be honest,” Copeland replied. “But apparently there’s a demand for dinosaur meat, mostly in the black market. Places like China are really crying out for the stuff; they say over there that dino meat is an aphrodisiac. I mean, what isn’t an aphrodisiac for the Chinese? And apparently dino meat is now one of the most expensive meats in the world, even more expensive than that Kobe beef. Between you and me though, I have tasted dino meat, specifically _Struthiomimus_ chops and _Triceratops_ ribs, and to be honest, I don’t understand how or why these people would want to eat dinosaur meat in the first place. It’s gamey, it’s dry, and even when cooked well done, it’s tougher than a rare steak, tougher than leather as well.”

“It’s because these rich people love to eat exotic foods because it shows us plebs that they can afford it and we can’t,” Owen chipped in. “They don’t have to like it. They just have to be seen eating it. It’s a luxury.”

“Well, if those rich folk want real luxury then they should try out one of Nana Copeland’s Philly cheese steaks! Remember Nana’s cheese steaks, Grady? Remember the way the grease and fat oozes out of the meat with every bite? Now that’s a real luxury.”

“Goddamn it, Copeland, you’re making me hungry,” Owen groaned. “You should know that Claire and I haven’t eaten anything but wild berries since noon.”

“Well, why didn’t you say anything before?” Copeland retorted.

“So how about those InGen people, what did you say again, ‘mingling’ with their creations?” Owen asked.

“You know about what happened in Jurassic World, correct?” Copeland asked in reply.

“Of course I know all about it. I was right in the middle of the damned thing. Claire here actually released the _T. rex_ so it could fight off the _Indominus rex_.”

“Well, think of it this way, man: InGen creates _Indominus_. _Indominus_ destroys park. Park needs new dinosaurs. InGen gets new dinosaurs from Site B. Simple as, isn’t it?”

“I guess,” Claire replied. “Although I’ve heard some rumors that Nublar might just be abandoned after this because Masrani Global has taken a massive, massive hit after this incident and apparently won’t even have an eighth of the capital needed to restart this whole thing.”

“Well, let’s just say that in the last few days, things just got a little bit more complicated than that,” Copeland said.

“How so? What do you mean by that?”

“Well, in the past few days, we have picked up some people who are in no way or form affiliated with either Masrani Global or International Genetics have been running around Isla Sorna trying to bag and tag some of the animals here.”

“I think I might have an idea who those people are,” Owen said. “They’re from Pardew Protection Services. From what they told us when they approached us to go here, the guys from Pardew said that a private jet carrying their owner’s children crashed on this island for unknown reasons. But I now believe that they’re just using that as a cover to get on this island because I think that maybe, just maybe, they’re here for Henry Wu’s feathered raptors.”

“Feathered raptors? You’re telling me Wu finally made that little dream of his come true?” Copeland asked. “I thought the bastard had already given up on it a long time ago.”

“Apparently he went right back to work on it, probably alongside or even as part of his research to create the _Indominus_ ,” Owen continued. “I have a feeling Vic Hoskins is probably behind it too. You know Wu and Hoskins. They’re two peas in a pod, at least as far as pushing the boundaries of dinosaur genetics is concerned. Wu wants to perfect the art of genetic manipulation while Hoskins wants dinosaur soldiers. And with InGen practically an independent division of Masrani, it was probably child’s play for them to make a clutch of eggs and then raise those raptors right here where no one particularly cares about what goes on in here.”

“Sneaky bastards,” Copeland muttered.

“Yeah, and that’s probably why Hoskins was real interested in seeing my raptors in action.”

“How’s the fat bastard anyway? I haven’t heard from him since news of the incident went out. Was he on Nublar during?”

“Right in the goddamned middle. He convinced Simon Masrani to use my raptors to hunt down the _Indominus_ but because Wu put some fucking raptor DNA into the _Indominus_ cocktail, the _Indominus_ turned the raptors against us and the ACU. Then Hoskins got killed by Delta, so you won’t be hearing from the fat bastard anymore.”

“Unless the dude comes back as a ghost,” Copeland said. “All right, man, so far I’m with you. But what the hell is Pardew’s role in all of this? What would they need combat dinosaurs for?”

“InGen isn’t the PMC that Hoskins turned us into anymore,” Owen replied. “We transitioned from military to civilian applications after that whole incident with the drone strike at that wedding in Yemen. That’s why we’re now augmenting the Costa Rican police for their local elections right now. But Pardew’s still conducting business with the military, and they’re kind of like the new Blackwater. I’m thinking that Hoskins got the idea of the combat raptors, convinced Wu to put some time in to make it a reality, and then he sold the idea to Pardew. I mean, it makes sense, right? If you’re going to use a raptor in warfare, might as well use it against an ISIS jihadi instead of some kid from Compton or Harlem with the Occupy Movement.”

“Goddamn,” Copeland muttered. “You know, if Mr. Masrani hears of this, he will be pissed with a capital P that both Wu and Hoskins went behind his back like this.”

“Yeah, unfortunately, Simon won’t be hearing about this ever,” Claire said. “He took over one of the ACU helicopters trying to contain the _Indominus_ , and then when the _Indominus_ broke into the Aviary, the _Pteranodons_ escaped and attacked his helicopter, and it crashed.”

“Jesus Christ,” Copeland said, shaking his head. “R-I-P. His helicopter was attacked by _Pteranodons_? Not a real nice way to go, I have to admit. No wonder you heard rumors that J-World is finally going under. There’s no way that either InGen or Masrani is going to recover from this.”

“Maybe that’s why Pardew finally decided to get his raptors,” Owen said. “If the company decides to abandon Site B once again and let all the dinosaurs run wild yet again, there’s a chance that at least one of those raptors that Wu made for him could be killed, and that’s a whole lot of investment down the drain immediately. And on the off chance that someone decides to restart Jurassic World once again, getting those raptors off the island would make sure that no awkward questions would be asked when someone arrives here to do a head count.”

“How about those two islands in the Azores and the Marianas?”

“They might just be sold back to Portugal and Japan respectively,” Claire replied. “From what I understand, there’s barely any infrastructure on both islands at the moment and large-scale construction and development on them isn’t meant to start until late 2016 or early 2017, and I don’t see that ever happening now that people think that Jurassic World is a dangerous place once again.”

“So thus dies the dream of John Hammond,” Copeland muttered.

“Hey, no need to be too melodramatic about it, man,” Owen said in an equally reserved tone.

Copeland reached for the radio mounted on the jeep’s dashboard and turned on the microphone.  
“Billy, this is Moe,” he called out. “I’m approaching the gates. You and Leona would not believe who I just found on the strip tonight.”

“Copy that, opening the gate now,” a scratchy male voice replied. “And don’t spoil the surprise just yet. I want to keep guessing until you finally arrive with our guests.”

“The gang’s still here, I take it,” Owen asked.

“All accounted for,” Copeland replied.


	19. Rest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Claire and Owen gain a welcome respite from all the running around and hiding and evading dinosaurs on Site B.

The jeep arrived in front of a large stainless steel gate painted matte black and disguised from view by a variety of fronds and plants around it. The gate swung inwards, and as soon as the gap between the gate and the fence was wide enough, Copeland drove the jeep through, then past a second interior gate, and then the jungle gave way to a small clearing in which an octagon-shaped building had been constructed. The building had a bunker-like feeling to it with its thick concrete walls and small openings aside for a steel door and a garage entrance built into the side of the bunker building. Copeland drove the jeep through the garage door before finally stopping inside, and as she looked back, Claire thought she could see an electric or laser grid shine to life just outside of the garage door before it slammed shut.

“Welcome to the Site B Tracking Center, lady and gentleman,” Copeland said, extending his hand. “The gang’s over at the command center; let me show you how we do things here.”

The command center itself was a large eight-sided chamber, with dozens of computer monitors and screens mounted on the walls. These screens were further divided into smaller sections in which numerous sectors of the island could be watched over at the same time. A man and a woman were seated on two sides of the octagon opposite the door leading to the garage, and as Copeland entered followed by Claire and Owen, the two stood up. “Let me introduce you to the gang,” Copeland said to Claire. “This is Willem-Louis Wilmots and Leona de Veyra.”

Willem-Louis Wilmots (Billy for short) was Dutch, born in Curacao and served with the Royal Dutch Army before making the leap to their special forces, and then he had retired and moved to Canada where he had been recruited by InGen. Wilmots had a shaved head and a thick beard, and his accent, though mild, was now more Canadian than Dutch. Leona de Veyra was born in America to Costa Rican parents and had been working as a dispatcher for a private security company before she was lured back to the country of her parents’ birth by InGen with the promise of much better pay. Leona was the outlier in the otherwise all-male group of former special forces operators, but she had been quickly accepted into the group both because she was very professional and very good at her job.

“So, Moe, didn’t you say something about having picked up a bunch of people not from InGen running around Site B?” Owen asked. “Mind showing us where you’ve last seen them?”

“I can do you one better than that,” Copeland replied. “Leona, go show Owen here where our mystery visitors are right now.”

“Sure thing,” Leona replied, and she swiveled around in her chair and got to work typing commands into her computer. She closed a window that appeared to be showing a soccer game and then expanded one of the nine frames on her monitor to show what appeared to be a group of people moving around on the island’s central plain. Their bodies glowed white hot on the infrared cameras being used for the night feeds.

“Where exactly on the island is this?” Claire asked as she leaned over Leona’s shoulder to take a closer look at the feed.

“Sector 070,” de Veyra said, looking at the timestamp on the corner of the video. “That’s a bit over to the southwest of Isla Sorna.”

“Can you clean up that image a little bit more?” Owen asked. Leona nodded her head and typed in some more commands into the computer, and the video feed cleared up somewhat. It now showed the group of people bunching together into a tight little circle, and what appeared to be weapons were being pointed outwards. It was a classic defensive formation to Owen’s trained eye, and he knew exactly why the group had formed themselves like that. “Can you check if there are any animals near that location?” he asked.

“Over here, Minnesota,” Billy Wilmots called out, and Owen walked over to his station, which was showing a thermal overview of Site B. Wilmots then used a mouse to zoom in on a specific part of the island. “Okay, so looks like there’s an _Iguanodon_ herd to their north and a pack of _Dimetrodons_ to their west but other than that, no real threats. There are compys all over the place, but then again, when aren’t they?”

“So it’s all clear then? No raptors, no dilos, no _Deinonychus_ , nothing?”

“Not really, no. This group is well outside the ranges of the nearest _Velociraptor_ tribes and _Dilophosaurus_ and _Deinonychus_ packs. However, if this group moves to the southwest towards the coast, they could very well end up straying into _Baryonyx_ territory.”

“Well, we certainly don’t want them to do that,” Owen muttered. “All right, is there any way that we can get to where they are from here?”

“Whoa, whoa, Grady, you’re seriously not thinking about going out there tonight, right now, to pick them up, are you?” Moe Copeland suddenly asked him.

“I mean, we already know where they are,” Owen replied. “Might as well get them out now while they’re all still in one piece, right?”

“Look, Owen, I understand what you’re trying to say to us here,” Copeland replied. “I really do. But even with all the cameras and trackers that we have in here right now, there are still things on this island that we don’t know about. Sometimes we would get heat anomalies on the thermal cameras and it would look like that it was a massive dinosaur, and then we would zoom in on it and it won’t be there anymore. I’m just saying that we don’t know what could be out there.”

“But right now, is there anything out there that could pose a danger to the group and/or me and Claire?” Owen asked back.

“Hey, why are you roping me into this?” Claire asked him quietly.

“All right, man,” Copeland said, shaking his head. “There’s an old road from here that leads to an abandoned dock over at the west-southwestern part of the island. That road passes near the place where this group had set up camp. You can take one of the gas jeeps and drive over to them if you make a move right now—”

Suddenly a yellow warning light on the ceiling above their heads spun to life. “Okay, what’s that and what does it mean?” Claire asked nervously as she looked up at the light.

“Asset proximity alert,” Copeland replied as he rushed over to his own console and began checking the numerous status updates.

“Asset proximity alert?” Claire repeated. “You mean to tell me that a dinosaur is getting close to the fence around this place? I thought you said this place was far away from the territory of any dinosaurs!” she said to Owen.

“Billy, Leona, can you see what’s tripped the alarm?” Copeland asked the others.

“It’s him,” Wilmots replied. “SPN-005. Big Boss.”

“Big Boss? Who’s that? What _is_ that?” Claire asked.

“I have a feeling we already know who Big Boss is,” Owen replied to her question.

“Put up some video, Leona,” Copeland ordered. “Where is he?” De Veyra switched the video feed on the main screen in front of them to a camera that appeared to be mounted on a joint on the first fence that they had passed through on their way to the tracking center. The camera gave them a good view of a large portion of the jungle surrounding the electrified heavy steel fence planted around the observation bunker. It also gave them a very nice profile view of the head of the _Spinosaurus_.

“Holy shit!” Claire cried out as she saw the _Spinosaurus_ on the monitor. “Does that thing never give up?”

“This whole thing has gone completely out of hand now,” Owen added. “That spino out there has gone beyond persistent now. It’s more like a slasher film killer now. That thing has been following us around this whole island ever since we hid in that warehouse.”

“What? You mean to tell me that Big Boss over here has been following you around Site B?” Copeland asked Grady. “Well, that explains his strange movement pattern, and why he’s strayed this far from his usual territory.”

“It’s a long story,” both Owen and Claire said at the same time. That made them look at each other in surprise, and then both of them decided to just shrug it off. “Tell you what, Moe, if we make it through this, I’ll buy you a beer in San Jose and tell you all about it.”

“Make it a Cerveza Negra and you’re on,” Copeland replied. “Anyway, I wouldn’t be afraid if I were you. Big Boss always has a little look-see around our place whenever he gets this far down from his territory. He bumps against the fence a few times and gets shocked but it’s like he doesn’t even feel it. But that’s just about what he does most of the time, look around, pace around, and maybe roar a little bit. But he’s not breaking through that fence. Trust me on that.”

Right on cue, the spinosaurus turned to look at the camera as if it knew that it was there and roared. They all could actually hear the roar inside the tracking center, and Owen saw Claire going pale, which was saying something because Claire was actually quite fair-skinned to begin with. Owen himself could feel his palms going cold and sweaty in his own fear and anxiety. He had been in combat before, fought against hardened al-Qaeda, Taliban, Boko Haram and even ISIS fighters. He had raised and trained (or done something very close to such an inherently untamable animals) velociraptors, and never before had he felt so scared and nervous. It was also the first time in a long time that he felt a genuine shiver up his spine.

The spinosaur began to poke its snout at the fence. Sparks traveled from the metal to the dinosaur’s snout and it flinched, once or twice, but like Copeland had said, the shocks didn’t seem to affect the spinosaur that much. And then, once it saw that rooting around with its snout simply wasn’t enough, the spinosaur began to headbutt the fence. The spino aimed the top of its skull at the fence, stepped back, and then it ran forward to strike the fence. As its head struck the fence, a big ball of sparks flew out and the camera winked out. Even the lights in the tracking center dimmed as power was redirected to the fence. “Switch to the overhead feed, quickly!” Copeland shouted.

Wilmots switched the video on the screen to the feed coming from the Masrani Global infrared satellite in geostationary orbit almost right over Isla Sorna. He got the feed up on the monitor just in time for them to see the spinosaur walking away from the fence. The dinosaur’s body glowed white hot on the monitor. The spino roared once again and rushed the fence, and the image bloomed into a large circle of white and power fluctuated yet again.

“Holy shit,” Copeland muttered. “Big Boss never attacked the fences like that.”

“I’m telling you, that thing knows that we’re here,” Claire said. “I don’t know how it knows; it just knows. Just like how it knew that we were in the radio room, in the cartel camp, and in the old terminal. That thing out there will not stop chasing us until it’s finally eaten us!”

“Heads up, Big Boss is going for round three!” Billy Wilmots shouted. The spinosaur roared once again as it butted against the fence yet again, and once again sparks flew out of the fence where the dinosaur had hit it. And once again, the spinosaurus walked away from the incident none the worse for wear. “Man, that is some messed up shit,” Wilmots muttered as he watched the dinosaur test the fence integrity. The _Spinosaurus_ roared one more time in frustration and then it walked away from the fence.

“Still want to go out there now?” Copeland asked.

“Well, when you ask me that question right after a dinosaur just almost busted through your fence…” Owen replied.

“It’s cool, man,” Copeland said. “You can always pick them up in the morning. Meanwhile, you and your girlfriend can stay the night here, eat some dinner, sleep someplace where you know dinosaurs can’t get to you. What do you say to that?”

“I’m not his girlfriend,” Claire said immediately.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Owen said at the same time. The two of them looked at each other once again, and once again both of them elected to ignore the fact that the two of them had spoken at the same time yet again.

“Well, no matter what the relationship status between the two of you is, the offer still stands.”

“All right, fine,” Owen said. “You said something about dinner?”

“We’ve got some MREs over there in the break room,” Copeland replied, gesturing with his thumb down the hallway at a pair of doors that were located farther down from where the main control room was. “The bunks are in the door furthest down the hallway.”

“Thanks, man,” Owen said. “I appreciate it. We appreciate it.”

Owen and Claire went into the break room where Copeland had told them some food was. “Do you think they have some vegan food in there?” Claire asked.

“Hang on, let me see,” Owen muttered as he rummaged through the cupboards in the break room for a vegan MRE. “Aha, here we go. Caesar salad MRE. That good enough for you?”

“It’s fine, just give me that,” Claire replied. Owen tossed her the MRE while he took one for himself from the cupboard. They tore open the brown packs and tucked into the food, the first decent meal that both of them have had for more than a day. As Owen ate through his chicken breast, he heard Claire call out to him. “Can I ask you something?” she said.

“Yeah, sure, what is it?” he replied.

“That time, when those feathered raptors were chasing the hypsys, and we were up on the trees, you said that you had an idea why the Pardew guys wanted us here on Site B,” Claire said. “Yet you never really explained to me what it was, mostly because you said you were busy trying to see if the raptors knew we were there. So why do you think Pardew wants us here?”

“I mean, where do I start?” Owen said with a sigh. “So let’s go back in time, say about a few months ago. Three, if you want to be specific. There I was, minding my own business, training Blue and the others when I get orders from Hoskins telling me to get my ass over to Site B to check out, well, something. Vic was vague about the whole thing, never really let on what it was all about. So I arrive here on Sorna, in the Masrani cloning facility, and I get steered immediately to one of the nurseries where this guy Frankie Jefferson—he’s this guy from InGen who let’s just say is in the same line of work as me—is surrounded by these juvenile raptors, feathered raptors. So Frankie asks me, no, begs me to help him sort out his raptors because they just won’t accept him as their alpha. And I tell him that there’s no way that he’ll become their alpha the way he’s doing it so I help him out by first calming down his raptors, or at least reduce their aggressiveness as much as they could because I felt like these raptors weren’t necessarily bred with calmness and submissiveness in mind. Then I taught Frankie how to assert himself over his raptors, maybe even choose a beta. I didn’t know how much of it Frankie really remembered or applied because I was called back to Nublar after only three days here, but if those Pardew guys wanted my ass back here, it must be because either Frankie couldn’t calm his raptors down or he needs my help once again.”

Claire nodded her head. “But why in the world would Henry make a bunch of feathered raptors for Pardew?” she asked. “If anything, I would’ve thought that he would actually make them for Hoskins. Or am I missing something here?”

“I don’t know too,” Owen replied with a shrug. “I know that Hoskins is friends with Pardew’s founder Richard Seamus Pardew but I don’t know if that has anything to do at all with Wu’s feathered raptors. Maybe Wu is just letting his inner capitalist out, selling his services to the highest bidder. Maybe he realized that there was no way that the _Indominus_ could be contained like the other animals on Nublar so he set up an insurance policy or two for himself.”

“Well, that makes sense. Henry does seem like the type to have a backup and a backup to his backup.”

They then ate the rest of their dinner in silence, and then once dinner was done, they threw the remaining stuff from the MREs into the trash, and then they headed for the bunk beds that Copeland had pointed out to them earlier. There were two rows of three bunk beds each lining two of the long walls, apparently in case more people needed to be assigned to this tracking center. Owen and Claire took the beds nearest to the door and settled in. And just before she drifted off, Claire heard Owen say to her, “Good night, Claire.”

“Good night, Owen,” Claire replied automatically, and then she drifted off to a dreamless sleep.


	20. Rescue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Owen and Claire finally get their mission to rescue the survivors of the Pardew plane crash underway, but once again the dinosaurs prove to be a very tough obstacle.

When Owen glanced at his watch after waking up, he saw that it was already 6:30 in the morning. He immediately got out of the bed that he had occupied in the tracking center “barracks” and headed for the control room, grabbing a few energy bars along the way. The three people manning the tracking center and keeping an eye on the dinosaurs of Isla Sorna were still in there. The trio’s leader in all but name, Morris Copeland, turned away from the main monitor to look at Owen. “Good morning, Minnesota,” he said. “Had a good night’s sleep with your girlfriend?”

“She’s not my girlfriend, Moe, not really,” Owen replied. “It’s very, very complicated. Anyway, any movement from our guests?” he asked.

“Looks like they’re on the move,” Copeland replied, looking back at the main monitor. “I think they’re heading out for the south coast.”

“Why the south coast?” Claire asked. She had woken up almost right after Owen did and had followed him into the control room. “What’s over at the south coast?”

“Nothing except the old dock, if I remember correctly,” Copeland said. “It’s just a beach by now with some old and rotting wooden structures. I don’t think there are any boats there left anymore. Maybe they hope to attract the attention of a passing boat, but the only boats that come here that aren’t official InGen or Masrani boats are dinosaur poachers and drug runners, but maybe they think that they’d rather deal with other people than the dinosaurs on this island.”

“Imagine that, they all feel the same way I do,” Claire muttered.

“Is there any chance that we can intercept them by going down the road to the old dock?” Owen asked Copeland.

Copeland looked at the main monitor and then at his watch. “If you get going in the next… five minutes,” he said, “you might just be able to catch up with them when they get to the road itself.”

“Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go! Oh, and I’m borrowing one of your jeeps, bro,” Owen said, reaching out for one of a pair of keys hanging on a hook just beside the door to the control room and taking it as he got out.

“You don’t mind me borrowing these, do you?” Claire asked as she took one of the compressed gas-operated tranquilizer guns on a rack in the side of the control room, along with three magazines of darts.

“Are you sure you can handle that?” Copeland asked her a little skeptically.

“Of course she can,” Owen replied for her. “She used one of those things to shoot a _Dimorphodon_ that was trying to eat my face. Oh, and we’re also taking one of your jeeps.”

“Did you really have to tell him all of that?” Claire asked Owen as the two of them got into the very same jeep that Copeland had used to pick them up from the old airstrip the night before. “You could have just said yes.”

“Oh, come on, are you telling me that you would rather have no one else know about what you did that day?” Owen asked back as he started the jeep’s engine.

“It’s not that, it’s just… Never mind,” Claire trailed off.

Owen grabbed the radio mounted on the jeep’s dashboard and called out, “Moe, we’re ready to go. Open up the gates.”

“Stand by,” Copeland replied. An alarm rang out and red lights began to flash around the garage door as it began to lift up. As soon as there was enough clearance between the door and their heads, Owen pressed the gas and the jeep leaped out of the garage and onto the dirt path that would lead them both back into the wilds of Site B. “Gates are open, guys,” Copeland called out as their jeep approached the gates which were also just sliding open. “Good luck out there. You’re gonna need it.”

“Don’t we know it, Moe,” Owen muttered, but not to the radio so only Claire could hear him. Then he asked her, “Are you ready to finally get off this island?”

“Ever since we first landed here,” Claire replied. Owen nodded his head and he mashed the accelerator once again to take the jeep beyond the gates and into the jungle. However, they weren’t able to get very far before they encountered their first and biggest obstacle yet. “Holy shit!” Owen shouted as he stepped on the brakes.

“Oh, my God,” Claire muttered as well.

The _Spinosaurus_ , the same one that had been chasing them all over Isla Sorna ever since they first arrived on this island, was sitting right on the dirt road, blocking it. The animal’s snout and tail also made it difficult for them to drive around it, as the electric fence bounded them on the left and the jungle to the right. A single acid green eye with a slit iris stared right back at them, but having said that, there was something that seemed off about the spinosaur itself. Neither Owen nor Claire could really put their finger on it until they both heard a soft snorting sound that seemed to be coming from the dinosaur itself. “I think it’s sleeping,” Claire whispered.

Owen reached for the radio and slowly pushed the transmit button. “Moe?” he asked in a low voice. The aim was to keep sentences and conversations short so as not to wake the spino up.

“Yeah, I see it,” Copeland replied as tersely.

“Ideas?” Owen asked.

“Go around?”

“Tail; jungle. Snout; fence.”

“That’s tricky,” Copeland said. “Okay, circle back to the gate. Take the long cut.”

“Ten-four.”

“So, the long cut, huh?” Claire asked.

“Yeah, there’s a fork in the road from the gate,” Owen replied. “It loops around the airfield before joining back with the road to the dock. At the very least, it’ll get us around Big Boss.” Owen then shifted to reverse as slowly and deliberately as possible, but then suddenly the gears began to grind. “Shit!” he said softly, immediately looking up at the spinosaur. The _Spinosaurus_ snorted and shifted its position, and then it settled back down and continued to snore. “Get ready to unload that thing into its face,” Owen said to Claire, referring to the tranquilizer gun in her hands. Owen then lightly tapped the accelerator and began to back the jeep away from the sleeping dinosaur before finally turning the wheel and steering the jeep back towards the right fork near the gate to the tracking center. He then shifted back to first gear, and once again the gears grinded with each other, and he could imagine the spinosaur stirring awake on the road to their left. Owen pressed the gas, and the jeep began to move, and then suddenly what sounded like a small explosion began coming out of the jeep’s exhaust. “Oh, for the love of God!”

“Time to get out of there, Minnesota,” Copeland called out on the radio.

“Like I haven’t realized that already, Philly,” Owen replied back, and then he pushed the jeep forward down the long cut. The drive down the long cut was quiet and actually pleasant, and they did manage to come across a few compy packs, but since they were on a fast-moving vehicle and the compys were quick to flee at the sight of the gas jeep, neither Owen nor Claire paid them any attention. Had they done so, they both would have noticed that the compys were running towards them and away from the intersection where the “long cut” joined back up with the road to the abandoned dock.

As it was, the drive had turned leisurely for Owen, so when he rounded the corner that would finally take them back to the road to the dock, he almost didn’t manage to see the hulking obstacle right in their way. Almost, since it was near impossible to miss a fifteen-meter tall dinosaur standing in the way to the intersection. “Oh, just our luck!” Claire exclaimed as Owen brought the jeep to a halt.

For a few brief tense moments, neither human nor dinosaur moved from their position. Brown and gray eyes stared back at acid green eyes, and nobody blinked lest they give up the first move. Finally, without to face Claire, Owen told her, “When I gun it, shoot him.”

“Shoot him? Shoot him where?”

“Anywhere! I don’t care. Just shoot him!”

Claire scoffed, and then she stood up, nestled the tranq gun on her shoulder and balanced the forward end of the gun on the windshield. The _Spinosaurus_ knew that something was up when it saw one of the small strange animals stand up inside the strange smelly and loud object, and it roared in an attempt to spook the small animals, a tactic which had worked before with all the other small animals it had encountered. But this time, the animals didn’t run away. Instead, the strange smelly object let out a roar of its own and it began to approach the spinosaur.

Owen mashed the accelerator and steered the jeep straight for the roaring _Spinosaurus_. There was no more time for fear or second-guessing; this was their best chance of rescuing the survivors of the Pardew crash, and he didn’t know if they were ever going to get another chance as good as this. This was something that needed to be done, and it needed to be done now. Owen was about to play the biggest game of chicken in his life, and it seemed fitting that he was up against possibly the biggest chicken of them all.

Beside him, Claire pulled the trigger of the tranq gun three times. There were three soft puffs of air as the compressed gas propelled the darts out of the gun, and three darts flew out of the barrel towards the _Spinosaurus_. One dart struck the dinosaur in the nose while the other two landed on its hind leg. The spinosaur flinched and bellowed, and it took a single step back from the road. That single step was enough for the jeep to slip past it and get back onto the main road.

“Yeah, that got his attention all right,” Claire said as she sat back down and watched the _Spinosaurus_ begin to chase them from the rearview mirror on her side. She couldn’t help but chuckle a little as she noticed the lettering on the bottom of the mirror: OBJECTS ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. _Of course it would say that_ , she thought to herself.

“Now our problem is that we’re never going to be able to get the survivors with Big Boss breathing down our ass,” Owen replied. He reached for the radio once again and called out, “Yeah, Moe, got any idea how to get this bastard off our back?”

“Yeah, man, I’m not so sure about that one,” Copeland replied. “You’re lucky the spino isn’t as fast as the _T. rex_ on the open road or anywhere else, but still…” Copeland then went silent for a minute before he returned to the radio. “Okay, Billy might have an idea here to get Big Boss off your tail, but I’m not sure you and your girl are gonna like it.”

“She’s not my girlfriend, Moe,” Owen pressed. “And just spit it out already! Do I have to slather myself in A1 sauce to do it? Is that what you mean?”

“Not really, but it might as well be,” Copeland said. “Now I want you to listen to me very carefully, Grady. You should be seeing a dirt path forking away to the right from the main road. Take it. Turn right.”

“I don’t know what you think this is gonna do, man, but okay…” Owen turned the wheel to the right and winced silently as his body bounced around in the jeep when they drove off the cracking pavement of the main road onto the lower dirt path. The _Spinosaurus_ roared and turned to follow the jeep.

“All right, Moe, we’re now on the dirt road,” Owen said. “What now?”

“Just keep following that road. Don’t go anywhere else. Stick to the road. Take it until you’re at the _Baryonyx_ ’s territory, and then when Rudy comes out, draw Big Boss to him!”

“Wait, did he just say drive right into _Baryonyx_ territory?” Claire asked. “Why are we now going into the territory of a dinosaur that’s just as dangerous, if not even more dangerous, than a _Spinosaurus_? And who the hell is Rudy anyway?”

“To be honest, I have no idea,” Owen replied, “but if Moe says that he’s going to help us get rid of this spino then I’m all for it!”

“Speaking of which, you did hit him with the tranq gun, right?” 

“Of course I did! I got the son of a bitch right on the nose with one of the darts! And I think I nailed him on the legs twice, so there!”

“Well then, if you got him three times then why the hell is he still following us!?” Owen demanded.

“How the hell should I know?” Claire shot back. “It’s probably one of Henry’s many, many experiments! Probably meant to be extremely resistant to tranquilizers and shit!”

The spinosaur roared at the jeep as both machine and animal drove through the thin jungle in this part of Sorna, and then surprisingly the roar was answered by another roar that came from the forest ahead of the jeep. The roar was somehow both deeper and more high-pitched than the spino’s roar at the same time, and for a few brief moments both Claire and Owen were straining to see the source of the second roar, and then a yellowish-white snout peeked out of the trees. The trees shook, and then the animal finally revealed its true form by walking out of the jungle.

It was a _Baryonyx_ , no doubt about it. The crocodile-like snout, eyes, and back scales were more than enough confirmation for it. But those weren’t its most prominent features; no, that distinction goes to the _Baryonyx_ ’s skin, which was mostly white in color. The snout was more yellowish, and there were also some faint yellow striations on its flanks, but the _Baryonyx_ was otherwise a more or less uniform white color. The only thing that stood out from the dinosaur were its eyes, which were a shade of light and bloody pink. The animal winced as it stepped out from the shade of the trees into the morning sunlight, but this time it didn’t slink back to the cover to the jungle. There was no doubt about it; this particular _Baryonyx_ was an albino.

“Oh, so _that_ ’s why they call him Rudy,” Claire muttered, more to herself than anyone else.

“These spinosaurids are very territorial with each other,” Copeland said on the radio. " _Baryonyx_ and _Spinosaurus_ and _Suchomimus_ and _Irritator_ all get into territorial display fights if one of them strays into the other’s territory, but nobody fights quite like Rudy and Big Boss. Now get the two of them to fight, and hopefully that will get Big Boss off your ass.”

“Oh, God,” Claire said “It just might work.” She felt nauseous and light-headed as her stomach began to tie itself into a knot. This was the exact same feeling that she had when she had made the decision to release the original _T. rex_ from its exhibit in Jurassic World to pit it against the _Indominus rex_ , which up to that point had gotten the best of everything else that had been deployed against it from the ACU to even Owen’s raptors. There was always a risk in pitting two large carnivorous dinosaurs against each other, and while it made for an impressive show for the park guests, it always never ended well for at least one of the dinosaurs.

Owen began to weave the jeep side to side while at the same time trying to stick to the dirt path as much as possible, hoping to attract the attention of the white _Baryonyx_. He also added a horn just to make sure, but it seemed as if he need not bothered because the _Baryonyx_ was already walking towards them. Or rather, it was actually walking towards the _Spinosaurus_ chasing their jeep, and it only looked like the albino dinosaur was walking towards them because the _Spinosaurus_ was right behind them.

_That’s right, boys, have at ‘em_ , Owen thought as he steered the jeep to the left to avoid the _Baryonyx_. The two dinosaurs roared as they finally matched up against each other, and then there was the sound of flesh slapping against flesh as the _Spinosaurus_ and the _Baryonyx_ began to attack the other. Owen steered the jeep back onto the dirt road as the two dinosaurs engaged in a territorial battle. “That got them off our butts,” he said.

“Now let’s just hope that that keeps them both occupied until we’re back in the tracking center with the survivors,” Claire agreed.

Without warning, another dinosaur burst out from the trees to their left, and Owen gasped and Claire screamed as the former tried to steer the jeep away from the dinosaur. They both got a glimpse of a large, stocky crocodilian body with brown skin, a gray underside, and blue and white lines down the flanks before the jeep landed in a rut at an awkward angle, and after seemingly driving on two wheels for a short amount of time, the jeep flipped and turned over. Were it not for the roll cage mounted on the jeep, both Owen and Claire could very well have been crushed by the jeep as it tumbled across the ground, but as it was, the impact of the rolls were still strong enough to bang them both around to the point of unconsciousness before the jeep finally settled onto its right side.


End file.
